With the conquest of Crimea in 1780, Russia replaced the Ottoman Empire as the main imperial power in the Black Sea. For almost a century and a half, the tsars would put a tremendous energy into extending their presence and asserting their dominance all around the Pontus. From the very onset, however, the symbolic prize and strategic goal of this expansion was Constantinople, the former Byzantine capital that controlled the straits to the Mediterranean, and which the tsars considered it their historical fate to rule as champions of Orthodox Christianity. The dream of “Tsargrad,” as the city was popularly known in many Slavic languages, went a long way back, and the road there had many paths. This roundtable will explore its various manifestations in Russian political, cultural and ideological imagination, and its culmination in the First World War and the revolutionary aftermath, when hundreds of thousands of imperial Russians – ironically – ended up as refugees in a city they had for so long dreamt of conquering.
During and in the immediate aftermath of World War I, commentators contended that it was primarily the ‘Tsargrad dream’ that sustained Russia’s war effort. However, the Bolsheviks’ coming to power following their coup in November 1917 appeared to have put an end to Russia’s dreams about Tsargrad. This talk intends to demonstrate that, Russian imperial…
This paper examines the significance of Constantinople in the work of the Georgian-Russian-French avantgarde author and book artist Ilia Zdanevich (1894–1975, pseudonym Iliazd). Zdanevich spent a year in Constantinople in 1920–21, in transit between his hometown of Tbilisi and his ultimate destination of Paris. He was to reside in France for the rest of his…
The East Slavs’ abiding fascination with Byzantium was not deterred by the formidable distance of their homeland from the empire. The very earliest descriptions of the Rus emphasise the arduous journeys they were willing to undertake in order to raid and trade with Byzantium, and the difficulty of this voyage was a defining characteristic of…
After years of lofty promises that one day a “Blonde Race from the North” in shape of Russian intervention would deliver the Ottoman Christian Orthodox from the dominance of the Sultan disillusion sat in. Some would begin to opt for Napoleon’s new European order and its political foundation in the French Revolution and give up…
Russian military involvement in the Bulgarian independence movement of the 1870s was of great importance for the ideological Christian reconquest of Ottoman territory. It brought Russian ambitions for territorial expansion—both on land and via the Black Sea—closer to Constantinople/Tsargrad. In order to advance Russia’s agenda, Sofia’s urban landscape was symbolically transformed from a Muslim to…