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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
By the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of 1774, which marked a disastrous defeat of the Ottoman empire by Russia, the Russians were accorded the right to build a church in Istanbul, in the Galata quarter. The treaty further specified that the church was to be under the protection of the Russian minister, who could make representations concerning it to the Sublime Porte. This church, and the Russian right to protect it and to make representations about it, furnished much of the basis on which Russian governments, in later years, built a claim to a broader right to protect the Greek Orthodox Church, even the Greek Orthodox people, in the Sultan's domains. The claims were exaggerated, but since the church in Istanbul was to be ‘of the Greek ritual’, as article 14 of the treaty said, the connexion seemed logical. The Turkish text of the treaty, however, as Cevdet Pasa reproduces it in his history, makes no mention of a church ‘of the Greek ritual’. Instead, his article 14 specifies that this church is to be called the dusugrafa or dosografa church (
).
1 Text of the treaty in English in Hurewitz, J. C. (ed.), The Middle East and North Africa in world politics: a documentary record, New Haven, 1975, 92–101Google Scholar.
2 Cevdet, Ahmed, Tāriḫ-i Cevdet. Tertīb-i cedīd, Istanbul, 1301–9, I, 289Google Scholar.
3 Kurat, Akdes Nimet, Türkiye ve Rusya: XVIII yüzyil sonundan kurtuluş savaşina kadar Türk-Rus ilişikleri (1798–1919), Ankara, 1970, 29Google Scholar. Kurat's text is not quite the same as Cevdet's article 14; the major variant is that Kurat converts kenīse into kilīse each time the word occurs, but the meaning is not affected.
4 Mu'āhedāt Mecmū'ast, Istanbul, 1294–8, III, 261.
5 Başbakanlik Arşivi, Ecnebi Defterleri 83/1, 144.
6 Literally, ‘Grekorossiyskago ispoviedaniya’. Polnoye sobraniye zakonov rossiyskoy imperil, St. Petersburg, 1830–1916, First Series, xix, 962Google Scholar.
7 Literally, ‘chiamata Russo-Greca’. Martens, G. F. de (ed.), Recueil des principaux traités…de l'Europe, Göttingen, 1791–1801, iv, 620Google Scholar.
8 A literal rendition from the manuscript copy in the Ecnebi Defterleri 83/1 and from Mu'āhedāt Mecmū'ast, whose wording is identical: Düvel-i sā'ireye kiyāsen kilīse-i maḫsūseden mā'adā Galaṭa ṭarafinda Beg Ogli nām maḥallenin yolinda tarīk-i 'āmda Rūsya Devleti bir kenīse eldirmek cā'iz ola işbu kenīse kenīse-i 'avāmm olub Rūsogrek kenīsesi ta'bīriyle tesmiye ve ile'l-ebed Rūsya Devletinin elçisi siyānetinde olub her dūrlū ta'arruz ve müdāḫeleden emīn ve berī ve hirāset olina. Cevdet adds one word, without changing the meaning—he says bir kenise binā etdirmek cā'iz. The Turkish text might allow a translation that begins: ‘The Russian government, besides the private church in the manner of the other powers, is permitted to have a church built’. But this phrasing, linking only the private embassy chapel to the analogy of the other powers, probably must be ruled out since it does not conform either to the Italian or to the Russian text.
The Italian article 14 reads, as Martens gives it: ‘L'altissima Corte di Russia potrà a norma delle altre Potenze, a riserva della Chiesa Domestica, edificarne una nelle parte di Galata nella strada detta Bey-Uglú, la qual Chiesa sarà pubblica, chiamata Russo-Greca, e questa sempre si manterrà sotto la protezione del Ministro di questo Impero, e anderà illesa da ogni molestia, ed oltraggio’.
The Russian article 14 reads: ‘Rossiyskomu Visochayshemu Dvoru, po primeru drugikh Derzhav, pozvolyayetsya, krome domashney v dome Ministra tserkvi, vozdvignut v chasti Galata, v ulitse Bey Oglu nazyvayemoy, publichnuyu Grekorossiyskago ispovedaniya tserkov, kotoraya vsegda pod protektsyeyu onoy Imperii Ministrov ostat'sya imeyet, i nikakomu pritesneniyu, ili oskorbleniyu podverzhena ne budet’.
9 Information on the Catholic churches and embassy chapels is in Belin, F. A., Histoire de la Latinité de Constantinople, second enlarged ed., ed. Chatel, R. P. Arsène de, Paris, 1894, 178, 227, 231, 241–2, 277–80, 302–6, 312–14, 332–4, 375–7Google Scholar; Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall,Constantinopolis und der Bosporus, repr., Osnabrfick, 1970 (original ed. 1822), n, 126–7. Perhaps the Russian desire for a church in BeyoǦlu was sharpened by the fact that the Austrian-protected church and embassy chapel there had both just been more permanently rebuilt in stone after being burned in the great fire of 1767: Belin, Latinité, 277, 333. However, like other Catholic churches in BeyoǦlu, they were not very prominent, because of simple exteriors or a situation somewhat off the main street: Brayer, A., Neuf années à Constantinople, Paris, 1836, I, 14Google Scholar. The Russian embassy was also destroyed by the fire of 1767.
10 Not all the old churches, of course, survived. A number of the pre-1453 churches had been converted into mosques. In the following three centuries Christians could not always secure fermans to repair burned churches, and sometimes the land on which destroyed churches had stood was expropriated by the Muslim authorities: Belin, Latinité, 303, 536; Mantran, Robert, Istanbul dans la seconde moitié du XVII siècle, Paris, 1862, 73Google Scholar. To be sure, Greek Orthodox churches had been constructed in Istanbul after the conquest—Ernest Mamboury, Istanbul touristique, Istanbul, 1951, 348–50Google Scholar, lists 24 of them built after 1453—but the presumption must be that they replaced older churches, or else were built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when the ban on new construction was occasionally relaxed.
11 Ye. Druzhinina, I., Kyuchuk-Kaynardzhiyskiy mir 1774 goda (yego podgotovka i zaklyucheniye), Moscow, 1955, 220–4, 295–6, 348Google Scholar. I am grateful to a reader of the original draft for several suggestions incorporated in this paragraph, as well as for some elsewhere.
12 Article 16, par. 9. Ecnebi Defterleri 83/1, 145.
13 Proclamation of 17 March 1775: Polnoye sobraniye zakonov, First Series, xx, 81. She did not specifically mention the BeyoǦlu church, however. A later Russian guidebook, for example, uses pravoslavniy to refer to Greek Orthodox churches in Istanbul: Antonii (hieromonach), Putevoditel' po Konstantinopolyu: opisaniye zamiyechatel'nykh i svyatyhh miyest, Odessa, 1884, 66Google Scholar. I am grateful to another reader of the draft for calling my attention to this point.
14 ‘dlya dukhovnykh, grekorossiyskoy zakon ispoveduyushchikh’: Druzhinina, , Kyuchuk Kaynardzhiyskiy mir, 221Google Scholar, quoting from the document in the Arkhiv Vneshney Politiki Rossii, Moscow. Did Obreskov use Italian in communicating with the Turks ?
15 ibid., 346, article 23: ‘vozdvignut v chasti Galati, v ulitse Bey-Oglu nazyvayemoy, publichnuyu grekorossiyskago ispovedaniya tserkov…’.
16 On the question of interpretations of the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca to allow Russian protection of Greek Orthodox generally in the Ottoman empire, see Davison, Roderic H., ‘“Russian skill and Turkish imbecility”: the treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji reconsidered’, Slavic Review, xxxv, 3, 1976, 463–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
17 Hurewitz, see p. 46, n. 1, above; Anderson, M. S., The great powers and the Near East, 1774–1923, London, 1970, 9–14Google Scholar.
18 ‘Treaties (political and territorial) between Russia and Turkey, 1774–1849’, in Great Britain. House of Commons, Sessional Papers, 1854, LXXII.
19 ibid., 1.
20 Martens, , Becueil, iv, pp. 606, n., 607Google Scholar.
21 Article 14, in this translation, reads: ‘À l'exemple des autres Puissances on permet à la haute Cour de Russie, outre la Chapelle bâtie dans la maison du Ministre, de construire dans un quartier de Galata dans la rue nominée Bey Oglu, une église publique du rit Grec, laquelle sera toujours sous la protection des ministres de cet Empire & à l'abri de toute gêne & de toute avanie’.
22 Theodor Schiemann noted the discrepancy between ‘Greco-Russian’ in the Russian text and ‘Greek’ in the French text, but its significance escaped him: Geschichte Russlands unter Kaiser Nikolaus I, Berlin, 1904–1919, i, p. 257, n. 1Google Scholar. Martens's earlier ‘private’ translation, presumably from the Italian, was in his Recueil, I, 507–22. Noradounghian, Gabriel (ed.), Recueil d'actes internationaux de l'empire ottoman, Paris, 1897–1903, I, 319–34Google Scholar, gives a French version that is probably also translated from the Italian. For further detail on other published versions in Turkish, Russian, Italian, French, and English see Davison, loc. cit., nn. 22, 36, 37.
23 von Reimers, Heinrich Christoph, Reise der Russisch-Kaiserlichen ausserordentlichen Gesandschaft an die ottomanische Pforte im Jahr 1793, St. Petersburg, 1803Google Scholar; von Struve, Johann Christian, Voyage en Krimée, suivi de la relation de l'Ambassade envoyée de Pétersbourg a Constantinople en 1793, tr. from German by Delamarre, L. H., Paris, 1802Google Scholar. Struve does say that on the Tsarina's feast day, 25 November/6 December 1793, there was a great celebration in the Russian ambassador's residence in Istanbul; and ‘after the celebration of divine service, which we attended with great ceremony in the Greek church, there was a very fine repast…’. But he does not identify the Greek church, which might be a local church or, quite possibly, the embassy chapel, since the impression Struve gives is that church and embassy were adjacent, though he does not say so explicitly.
24 Krasnokutskiy, Aleksandr Grigorevich, Dnevnyya zapiski poyezdki v Konstantinopol v 1808 godu, Moscow, 1815Google Scholar. He remarks on the grave of a Russian major in Istanbul, and presumably would have mentioned a Russian-protected church, especially as his account reveals him to be a believer.
25 Antonii, , Pulevoditel' po Konstantinopolyu, who lists present-day ‘Christian’ (i.e. Greek) churches pp. 99–101Google Scholar, including two in Galata but none in BeyoǦlu (Pera); Korkmas, D. and Skokovskaia, M., Putevoditel' po Konstantinopolyu, Constantinople, 1912Google Scholar, which notes in part II, p. 31, that Pera has ‘monasteries and big Christian churches’ without specifying whether Catholic or Orthodox, and in part IV, p. 29, lists Russian establishments in Istanbul (consulate, banks, schools, archaeological museum), but no church.
26 Second ed., Paris, 1788–1824, 7 vols. in 8. D'Ohsson, dragoman for the Swedish legation, knew BeyoǦlu well. He mentions the Russian right under the treaty to build a church: VII, 463–4.
27 Elizabeth Craven,A journey through the Crimea to Constantinople, repr., New York, 1970 (first ed., Dublin, 1789); Hammer, , Constantinopolis, who lists and describes 24 Greek churches, I, 446–66Google Scholar; Brayer, , Neuf anneés, who mentions only Catholic churches in Pera, and Greek Catholic communicants, II, 14Google Scholar; Pertusier, Charles, Promenades pittoresques dans Constantinople, 3 vols., Paris, 1815Google Scholar, who has much to say on Galata and Pera and on Greek church organization; Auldjo, John, Journal of a visit to Constantinople in the spring and summer of 1833, London, 1835Google Scholar, who speaks often of the Russians then at Hunkar Iskelesi and about the metropolis; von Tietz, Friedrich, St. Petersburgh, Constantinople, and Napoli di Romania in 1833 and 1834, 2 vols., London, 1836Google Scholar, who mentions three Catholic churches in the ‘long street’ of Pera, II, 126–7; MacFarlane, Charles, Constantinople in 1828, second ed., 2 vols., London, 1829Google Scholar, who is quite favourable to the Greeks at the time of Russia's attack on Turkey; White, Charles, Three years in Constantinople, 3 vols., London, 1845Google Scholar, an industrious inquirer; Davydov, A. I., Zhivopisniye ocherki Konstantinopolya, St. Petersburg, 1855Google Scholar, who writes during the Crimean (Russo-Turkish) war and makes a point of describing Hunkâ Iskelesi, where the Russians had encamped in 1833.
