Valentina Izmirlieva, Columbia University

There are few religious phenomena better studied than the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The abundance and complexity of the available studies on this subject, however, should not be mistaken for comprehensiveness. Existing scholarship traditionally privileges Western Christian palmers. To the extent that Eastern Orthodox pilgrims are studied at all, they are approached primarily through Russian sources. The unspoken assumption seems to be that, if you know what Russians do in Jerusalem and why, you have learned everything there is to know about Orthodox pilgrimages to the Holy Land. We find perhaps the most obvious manifestation of this assumption in comparative studies of pilgrimage: the few that consider the Eastern Orthodox pilgrimage tradition address it exclusively in terms of Russian palmers.

Such an approach leaves the Christians of the Ottoman Empire and their pilgrimages to Ottoman Jerusalem completely out of sight. Significantly, such an assumption falls back into familiar nineteenth-century patterns: not only the Russian imperial rhetoric of the "Orthodox Commonwealth," but also the peculiar myopia of Western pilgrim narratives that renders all Orthodox pilgrims in the Holy Land as "Russian."

In an attempt to address these issues and partially correct the flaws they present, I have chosen as protagonists for my study Eastern Orthodox pilgrims to Jerusalem who came from the heart of the Balkan peninsula--the European outpost of the Ottoman empire during the 18th and 19th centuries. In a non-Arabic context, the use of the term hajji for a Christian pilgrim is emphatically marked, suggesting a special cultural significance for its appropriation--a significance which this article aims to unpack and interpret in its historical context.