Blaramberg, I. P.

An army officer, Ivan Pavlovich typified the foreigners who found themselves in service to the Russian state during the reign of Alexander I. He moved there in 1797, originally working for the British, but transferred into Russian service in 1804. No longer with the military, he ended up in Odessa, New Russia, in 1808. By 1812, he was head of the Odessa customs office, an important position for this port city; he retired in 1824. In Odessa he met Du Brux and Stempkovskii, and the three of them worked out their growing interest in the antiquities along the Black Sea littoral. When Tsar Alexander I ordered that museums be built in Odessa and Kerch, on Crimea, to house these treasures, Governor-General of New Russia M. S. Vorontsov quite naturally appointed the established bureaucrat with the passion for the exotic past, Blaramberg.