Europe has always had an interest in and fascination with the part of the world today called “the Middle East,” the lands to its south and east, which have since the seventh century been the heartlands of the Realm or House of Islam (Dar al-Islam).
Although such interest can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome, which borrowed much from those lands - even their alphabets and measures of time - it grew considerably after Europe's conversion to Christianity, which also originated in the Middle East.
Indeed, even after the Arab conquest of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, this curiosity continued, and pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, and sailors of various sorts travelled there until the European discovery of the Americas and the end of the Middle Ages. Since then, despite frequent wars and religious and other conflicts, such contacts have never been completely broken, and advances in travel, especially new ocean-going and much faster ships, increased such voyaging in modern times, especially in the nineteenth century.1Most modern research and writing on these contacts concern western European pilgrims, Crusaders, travellers, and such, with very little written, at least in English, about the eastern Europeans, especially the Slavs. But Slavonic Europe too played a role in this “contact between civilizations,” if one may use this much-disputed term. The present chapter surveys and investigates a major aspect of these eastern European contacts: the experiences, voyages, and writings of Ukrainian (or “Ruthenian,” to use an old term, from the medieval Latin for Rus') and Polish pilgrims, travellers, adventurers, exiles, scholars, and artists, most of them from the vast but under-populated eastern borderlands of old Poland, especially the Ukrainian Steppe lands that in the nineteenth century came to be called in Polish “Kresy” (plural of edge).2
The reasons why these Kresy, and especially those Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, produced so many travellers, especially in the nineteenth century, are unclear, but they were the focal point of Ottoman Turkish and Crimean Tatar influence in that part of Europe, north and east of the Carpathian Mountains - the region that W.H. McNeill once called “Europe's Steppe Frontier” - and, especially during the post-Napoleon Romantic period, they saw numerous uprisings against Russian imperial rule. Certainly, some of those Ukrainian/Polish (or Polish and Ukrainian) adventurers and exiles looked to the Ottoman Empire and the Lands of Islam for help against that Russian dominion and, on occasion, found it. Nevertheless, simple interest in and fascination with “the Orient” motivated many travellers.3