Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2017 number

The article’s objective is to acquaint the academic community with unknown handwritten materials, which contain information about Siberian Orthodox pilgrims who died in the Holy Land. The author identified these documents while describing the Russian hospital fund of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission Archive in Jerusalem. They contain information on the pilgrim deaths in 1883-1912, who arrived from West Siberia - Akmola (Omsk), Amur regions, Tobolsk and Tomsk provinces, as well as the pilgrims of East Siberia - Irkutsk and Yenisei provinces who died in 1864-1891. Such academic methods as descriptive, comparative-historical, source study, palaeographic ones have been used in this research. They allow establishing that the most valuable information about the pilgrims is contained in the death certificates (although the hospital register books of dead patients, metrical books and passports, as well as data of the Russian monastery necropolis and cloister at the Holy Land are investigated). As a rule, death certificates contain information about the first, last and patronymic name of the pilgrim, where he arrived from and at what age, and what disease he died of, where he was buried, who confessed and gave sacraments to him, who read the burial service over and when and who wrote the death certificate. The deceased patient’s medical certificates have kept very important information about the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission confessors, among them was Hieromonk Vladimir (Giganov) born in Siberia, who came from the spiritual estate, and graduated from the Tobolsk Theological Seminary. The new documents introduced into the academic circulation extend our knowledge on the pilgrims from remote parts of Russia - their age, social status, etc. The revealed information showed the problem of further studying the Siberian pilgrims’ biographical information in regional archives, which is relevant to Russian historians, ethnographers and archeographers.