The Chora Church was part of a monastery complex in Constantinople, an exemplar of the 14th-century Palaeologian Renaissance. After the Ottoman conquest, it was transformed into the Kakhrie-dzhami mosque.
Theme: Christian East
An Orientalist and one of the first Russian archeologists to excavate in Samarkand and other points in Central Asia, Nikolai Ivanovich was one of the most productive and among the most familiar. In addition to Central Asia, he excavated in the Kuban region between the Black Sea and the Caucasus, and excavated the Maikop culture, a major find. He lectured at the Petersburg Archeological Institute, served on the IAK, and published widely. His best-known work was “Mosques of Central Asia” (1905).
A professor of Slavic philology at New Russia University, Poruzhenko specialized in Bulgaria; emigrating there during the Civil War, he taught Russian literature at the University of Sophia and was active in emigre circles. He had served as secretary of the Odessa Society, 1890-192.il War
Her biographies tend to emphasize that she had inspired Lev Tolstoi’s Kitty Shcherbatskaia in “Anna Karenina,” but play down her role as the most formidable female scientist in Imperial Russia. To be fair, she always subjugated herself to her husband, Alexei, even for the 30 years following his death in which she organized the congresses, published the essays from them, developed the Caucasus Museum, and fought to open locally based museums of antiquities throughout the empire. She excavated and published extensively, and her first love were the Christian artefacts in the Caucasus. Professionalism in Russian archeology is unimaginable without her.
Born in Minsk and educated first in Vilna, Boris Turaev pioneered in Egyptology in Imperial Russia. He worked in the museums of all the European capitals before returning to St. Petersburg University to begin lecturing on “The Ancient East,” which also included the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Persia. He also traveled to Russian regional museums to study the Egyptian artefacts each had on display. Curator of the Egyptian section of the Museum of Fine Arts name for Alexander III, he also, with Nikolai Marr, began the journal “Christian East” in 1912.
The oldest of four brothers, all of whom had tangential associations with archeology, Fedor was a Byzantinist, best known as the director of the Russian Archeological Institute in Constantinople, which opened in 1894. Uspenskii was particularly interested in studying the Slavic lands of the Ottoman Empire via the Institute, especially their Orthodox artefacts. Although the guns of August, 1914, forced the closure of the Institute, Uspenskii took his archeological ambitions to the Russian Army on the Caucasian front, where it was enjoying success against the Turkish forces. Planning for a Russian victory, he dreamed of a Russian liturgy being prayed in the Hagia Sophia.
The “father of Russian archeology,” Alexei Sergeevich was being educated by his father, the Minister of Education and President of the Academy of Sciences, for a diplomatic posting. Scions of the Razumovskii family, a favorite of Tsaritsa Elizabeth I, the Uvarovs had all the necessary social connections. All Alexei needed was one visit to Pompeii, and he switched careers immediately. An avid numismatist, he wanted to collect more artefacts than just the coins. A founding member of the Russian Archeological Association in St. Petersburg, following a break with Sergei Stroganov of the IAK, he moved to Moscow and formed a rival society. It was Uvarov’s Moscow-based Society that organized the 15 successful archeological congresses, the only sustained academic symposia in Imperial Russia.
Nikolai Vladimirovich came from a line who had been ennobled in 1674. His father abandoned the family in childhood, and he fell under the influence of his uncle, architect N. P. Miliukov, father to Paul. After graduating from the construction department of the Institute of Civil Engineers, he made a chance acquaintance with Count S. D. Sheremetov, which resulted in his designing the restorations of the estates for some of Russia’s most prominent families. As an archeologist, he was deeply interested in religious architecture, especially Byzantine and the so-called “False Russian.” Both are evident in his best known work, the Cathedral of Peter and Paul that he designed in 1892 at Peterhof. He also taught architectural history and published a textbook on it. His wife Ekaterina Pavlovna published short stories in “thick” journals and the couple, and their one son, entertained the spectrum of Russian literati. Interestingly, his cousin Paul enjoyed the company of Sultanov’s estranged father. Sutanov deprecated his cousin’s politics, but the two were on good terms.
Count I. I. Tolstoi, son of the Minister of Posts and Telegraph, would himself become the Minister of Education during the 1905 Revolution; like much else about liberalism in those years, he did not survive the position, but was later elected to the St. Petersburg City Council. A member of the IAK from 1886, he was among those who broke with the IMAO in 1889 in the contest for archeological authority in the empire. A numismatist, he co-edited with Kondakov the commanding five volumes on Russian antiquities. He was also secretary and vice-president of the Academy of Arts, important given the overlap that continued between art and archeology, especially prevalent in Kondakov’s work on iconography.
Sizov worked closely with both Uvarovs in several fields. First, he with Alexei he dug in kurgans all around the empire, and he helped them to establish the Historical Museum. His most important finds were in the Gnezdovo kurgans in the NW, around Smolensk, where he found evidence of Slavs and Varangians living peacably together; from this he postulated that the Varangians were the aristocracy in the region. Later he participated with Praskovia on her Materials of the Archeology of the Caucasus. He served on the Commission for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, but also found time to work with the Imperial theatres.