Three Eighteenth-Century Travellers
The eighteenth century saw three outstanding travellers to the Middle East from Poland and the Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian Vasyl Hryhorovych- Barsky (1701-1747) from Kyiv spent twenty-five years journeying throughout the Ottoman Empire and especially the Levant.
As a student of the Orthodox Mohyla Academy in Kyiv he acquired an interest in the Holy Places in the Islamic East, especially Orthodox monasteries, and after a visit to Italy he went to Constantinople and Mount Athos. On route, he learned Greek and composed a journal of his travels across Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and the Holy Land, where he stayed in various monasteries and described the locals, their languages and customs, and the economies, history, and physical geography of the region. He took monastic vows in Antioch, but could never quite settle down. His journals included over one hundred and fifty drawings and pictures and vividly recounted his many adventures, as well as describing churches, shrines, and monasteries.These journals represented a new form of literature in the eastern Slavonic world, and some modern scholars consider them the first real Slavonic autobiography. They became enormously popular after his death, circulated in manuscript, and went through six printed editions between 1778 and 1819; when a four-volume edition of his journals came out, it greatly impressed N.G. Chernyshevsky, the ideological leader of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia, as Soviet historians once liked to note.30 Moreover, his drawings of Egyptian monuments and other antiquities were so accurate that at least one Soviet historian claimed that they excelled those produced a century later in the great Description de l,Egypte commissioned by Napoleon.31
The scholarly Jesuit Tadeusz Krusinski (1675-1751), originally from Poland proper, taught for several years at Ostroh in Volhynia and died at Kamianets-Podolsky, both in right-bank Ukraine, and is best known for his writings on Iran.
In the early eighteenth century, within the Catholic church, various national communities seemed to focus their missionary work in specific regions of the world. Thus Spain was most concerned with the Americas (much of it part of their empire) and North Africa, France with Syria and the Levant, and it fell to Poland to treat with Iran.Of course, Polish diplomats had long been active in Persia, but Krusinski was the most talented, cultured, and observant, and the best linguist, becoming court translator for the Safavid Shah Hossein. He was in Iran when the Gilzai Afghans under Mahmud Hotak toppled the long-standing Safavid dynasty and witnessed the sack and partial destruction of Isfahan: “The most famous [city] of the East... exceeds Constantinople in Bigness, Populousness and Magnificence of Buildings and Riches.” Even today, the saying “Isfahan, nisf-e jahan!” (Isfahan is half of the world!) is universally known in Iran.
Krusinski described these events in a lively fashion and gathered information on the Afghan invaders, then largely unknown in Europe. He was the first modern European scholar to describe the Hindu Kush and prepared the first European history of Iran. He wrote a great deal in Latin on his experiences in Iran, most famously a history of the Afghan invasion - Relatio de mutationibus Regni Persorum (almost immediately translated into English as A History of the Late Revolutions in Persia32) - which appeared in several other European vernaculars and Ottoman Turkish. It became one of the first books printed in the Muslim world, where Islamic scholars were suspicious of this new technology from the kafir north. The book was referred to by John Malcolm in the next century, Percy Sykes a century after that, and all subsequent historians of Iran.33
Count Jan Potocki's (1761-1815) influential family held enormous estates in Podolia in western Ukraine. Throughout his life, he travelled widely in Europe, but also visited Turkey, Egypt, and North Africa, including Morocco in the Arab far “west” (Maghreb).
He took part in at least one raid by the Knights of St John of Malta against Muslim shipping in the Mediterranean and in this way acquired a lively interest in the Middle East. He was also a politician, who took part in Poland's famous Four Year Sejm, or Parliament, which passed the Constitution of May Third (1791) intended to reform the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and he was a scientist and the first person to fly in a hot-air balloon above Warsaw.During his varied travels, Potocki acquired an interest in the strange and the occult and in later life began writing on these subjects in French. These interests eventually led to his suicide at his chateau in Podolia. Aside from penning numerous works on Ukrainian archaeology and ancient history (some copies of which he sent to Thomas Jefferson and are today in the Library of Congress), he wrote travel books and horror stories with supernatural and grotesque motifs. His example spurred his kinsman Count Wadaw Rzewuski/Viacheslav Revusky - nicknamed the “Emir” - to travel in the Levant, which subject we explore below in chapter 2.34