Light and sight: Vasilij Grigorovich Barskij, Mount Athos and the geographies of eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox Enlightenment

While over the past fifteen years there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the value of thinking ‘geographically’ in understanding the nature of eighteenth-century intellectual culture, the geographies of non-western European Enlightenments still remain largely uncharted. This article focuses on the Orthodox Enlightenment through the lens of the accounts and sketches of Vasilij Grigorovich Barskij (1701e1747), a Kievan Orthodox ‘self-enlightener’ who for twenty-four years travelled by foot across central Europe and the Ottoman Empire recording the places he saw in the utmost detail. His texts and images have usually been considered separately and used by scholars as valuable sources of factual information. Set in conversation with each other, however, they open a fascinating window on the Orthodox Enlightenment as a ‘way of seeing’ and perceiving the world. Paying specific attention to Barskij's two visits to Mount Athos in 1725e1726 and 1744 (towards the outset and end of his journeys), the article aims to explore the role of the Russian Orthodox Enlightenment in shaping perceptions and representations of space and place, and to show how tensions between critical enquiry and Orthodox tradition were negotiated by Barskij through narrative and visual strategies. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 2 There are later editions dated 1785, 1793, 1800 and 1819. 3 The most accurate published edition is N. Barsukov (Ed.), Stranstvovaniia Vasil'ia Grigorovicha-Barskago po sviatym mestamvostoka s 1723 po 1747 g, 4 vol, St Petersburg, 1885e1887. The only substantive part of Barskij's travels that has been translated into English is his journeys to Cyprus, see A. Grishin (Ed.), A Pilgrim's On 20 July 1723 a twenty-two-year-old student and son of a wealthy merchant from Kiev left his degree, his family and his native country. He would only return home twenty-four years later. Sustaining himself mainly on charity, during these years he uninterruptedly travelled by foot through what are today Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy, Greece, the Holy Land, Cyprus, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Romania. He visited their main Christian shrines; he perfected his Latin; he picked up Italian and became familiar with its dialects; he learnt Greek; he became a monk. About a month after his return to Kiev in 1747, he died. Vasilij Grigorovich Barskij (1701e1747) e such was the name of the wanderer e left us with over a thousand pages of accounts of his travels in Slavonic accompanied by scores of drawings.1 As he moved throughout Europe and the Ottoman Empire, Barskij described and sketched places, buildings, monuments, artifacts, church rituals, costumes and any other thing that he deemed curious or worthy of attention e and he did so in the utmost detail. ovich Barskij in the Holy Lands 3 folia, and are accompanied preserved at the Akademiia The resulting manuscript was first published in a highly abridged and corrupted edition in 1778 (over thirty years after his death) and underwent at least four reprints.2 Forgotten for decades, it was republished in 1885 in a much improved edition sponsored by the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society. To date, most of the text remains untranslated.3 Because of their extensiveness and almost obsessive attention to detail, Barskij's writings have generally been used by ecclesiastical and architectural historians and Byzantinists as a precious mine of factual information on church architecture and on monastic and Account of Cyprus: Bars'kyj's Travels in Cyprus, Altamont/New York, 1996. Other parts of his accounts have been translated into other languages, but there is no complete translation or critical edition. The most significant effort has been made by architect Pavlos Mylonas and his successors, which has resulted in a Greek translation and critical edition of over 700 pages of Barskij's journeys to Mount Athos, see P. Mylonas (Ed.), Вasίlh Gkrhgkοrόbitz Мpάrski: ta taxίdia tοy stο Άgiοn Όrο2, 1725e26 kai 1744e45, Thessaloniki, 2009. All the translations from this text in the following pages are mine. V. della Dora / Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016) 86e103 87 secular life in the Orthodox East.4 Likewise, and for the same reason, Barskij's sketches are usually valued for their architectural accuracy in an age before photography.5 Seldom, however, have text and image been considered together, and even more rarely has Barskij's work caught the attention of historical geographers. Set in conversation, his texts and images provide not only valuable historical records, but also fascinating windows on the spatial perceptions and complex geographies of Orthodox Enlightenments in the first half of the eighteenth century. Together, they offer a unique insight into the largely unknown world of non-Western Enlightenment geographies and the previously unexplored spatialities of religion at this time.6 Over the past twenty years the conception of the Enlightenment as a unified secular, metropolitan and scientific philosophical movement has been increasingly problematized. Indeed, the very idea of Enlightenment as a fixed set of beliefs has been largely replaced by an understanding of Enlightenment ‘as a way of thinking critically in and about the world’.7 In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the term ‘philosophy’, J.G.A. Pocock argues, was not always taken to indicate a body of systematic thought: it was ‘amethod rather than a system’.8 Likewise, the term ‘Enlightenment’ was understood differently from how we use it today. It was not employed to ‘map’ a period of European history, nor was it used as a label for generalization, nor as an inclusionary (or exclusionary) definition. Pocock thus suggests that wewould do better to think of ‘a family of Enlightenments e various movements comprising both family resemblances and family quarrels’.9 This approach leads to a picture of Europe as a complex world of crossfertilizations in which rationalism and revealed religion sometimes clashed, but in many other cases coexisted and attempted to come to terms with each other. It was a world in which the Enlightenment project coexisted with a pluralist account of 4 As Alexander Grishin notes, Barskij's accounts and sketches are in many instances either our earliest, or sometimes our only, records for the original appearance of Byzantine buildings, or for buildings that no longer exist, especially in Greece and Cyprus. For example, his detailed drawing of Hosios Loukas and its accompanying annotations have been invaluable for conservators and art historians trying to determine the original eleventh-century iconographic programme severely damaged during the following century. See А. Grishin, A Byzantine pilgrim: Bars'kyj's manuscript and its real and imagined audiences, in: G. Kratzmann (Ed.), Imagination, Books and Community in Medieval Europe Melbourne, 2009, 147. Examples of the use of Barskij's descriptions as sources for archaeological information include: D. Mouriki, Stylistic trends in monumental painting of Greece during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 34/35 (1980/ 1981) 77e124; D. Winfield and C. Mango, The church of the Panagia tou Arakos, Lagoudera: first preliminary report, 1968, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23/24 (1969/ 1970) 377e380; C. Mango, E. Hawkins and S. Boyd, The Monastery of St. Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis (Cyprus) and its wall paintings: part I, description, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990) 63e94; C. Mango, Notes on Byzantine monuments, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 23/24 (1969/1970) 369e375; C. Mango and E. Hawkins, Report on field work in Istanbul and Cyprus, 1962e1963, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964) 319e340; A. Frolow, La date des mosaïques de Daphni, Revue Arch eologique 2 (1962) 183e208. 5 For example, see G. Speake, Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise, New Haven and London, 2002, 132; G. Athanasiad es, Scεdiastikή a4ήghsh tοy Άquna (ή para thrώnta2 prοsεktikά tοn Вasίliο Gr. Мpάrsky), in: S. Athanasiad es (Ed.), Οdοipοrikό stο Άgiοn Όrο2, Thessaloniki, 1999, 96. 6 C.W.J. Withers and R.J. Mayhew, Geography: space, place and intellectual history in the eighteenth century, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2011) 446. 7 C.W.J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason, Chicago, 2007, 1. 8 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, volume 2, Cambridge, 2001, 18. 9 R.A. Jones, The work of J.G.A. Pocock, Religion 30 (2000) 402. 10 B. Young, The Enlightenments of J.G.A. Pocock, History of European Ideas 25 (1999) 213. Similarly, through his comparative study of the Scottish and Neopolitan Enlightenments, Robertson made the case for the existence of the Enlightenment as a coherent, unified intellectual movement of the eighteenth century, see J. Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680e1760, Cambridge, 2005. Enlightenments.10 As Charlie Withers and others have painstakingly shown, Enlightenment ideas (including critical, analytical and scientific concerns) were not simply dependant on centre-periphery relationships, nor did they ‘free-float’ over territory. On the contrary, as they moved across space they took on new meanings and were appropriated in ways peculiar to their cultural contexts of reception. These processes of appropriation often resulted in new and unique formations which were often very different from western European forms of radical Enlightenment (such as the French). There was, for example, Pocock argued, a distinctive ‘Protestant Enlightenment’ in which English Calvinists particularly became involved. Other forms of ‘soft’ or ‘moderate’ European Enlightenments, which sought to reconcile pietism and rationalism, spanned the German Aufkl€ arung, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Neapolitan illuminismo.11 In eighteenth-century Russia, of which Kiev and western Ukraine were part, local ‘enlighteners’ produced a rich culture that effectively blended Enlightenment ideas of progress, reason and critical enquiry with Orthodox spiritual tradition. As withmoderate mainstream and religious Enlightenments across Europe, this Enlightenment ‘reconciled reason and revelation, science and religion, human autonomy and providence’,12 and yet, as we shall see, it bore a typically Orthodox imprint which made it distinctive from those European moderate Enlightenments. These Orthodox Enlightenment principles moved through, and largely by means of, pre-existing religious infrastructures and networks. Church intellectuals actively contributed to the transmission of European ideas to Russia and the rest of the Slavic world, and made an original contribution to the pan-European republic of letters. Their conception of Enlightenment, however, had to do first of all with the enlightenment of the human soul (which was perfectly in line with the Orthodox doctrine). As Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter observes, ‘for lay intellectuals reason guided themoral development of the human person. For church intellectuals right reason strengthened religious faith and encouraged conscious Orthodox belief, at least among educated believers’.13 Unlike its Western radical counterparts, or the Greek Diaph otismos, the Russian Orthodox Enlightenment was a project for the transformation of the human being, even before that of society.14 During his lifelong journey Barskij moved through extended and well-established international networks of Orthodox shrines, ecclesiastical schools, monasteries, patriarchates and other religious institutions which often also served as centres for learning. Towards the later part of his journeys he participated in the Greek Enlightenment movement in Cyprus and acted as a peripatetic link between the Russian and Greek Orthodox worlds. Traced on a map, Barskij's travels allow us to chart the networks and key nodes of eighteenth-century Orthodox geographies of knowledge. Perhaps even more interestingly, however, Barskij's travel accounts and 11 Withers, Placing the Enlightenment. On the Scottish and Neapolitan Enlightenments, see Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment. 12 E. Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment in Catherinian Russia: The Teachings of Metropolitan Platon, DeKalb, IL, 2013, 5. 13 Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment, 21. 14 The term Diaph otismos refers to the Greek Enlightenment. Like the Russian Orthodox Enlightenment, the Diaph otismos emphasized the role of education. Its historical significance, Paschalis Kitromelides observed, however, lay in its aspiration ‘to transform the life of the Balkan peoples living under the Ottoman domination, on the model of Western culture, and ... to integrate the nations of the European periphery into the common historical destiny of the continent’, see P. Kitromelides, The Enlightenment East and West: a comparative perspective on the ideological origins of the Balkan political traditions, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 10 (1983) 55. See also S. Batalden, Catherine II's Greek Prelate: Eugenios Voulgaris in Russia, 1771e1806, New York, 1982. 18 Sevcenko, Ukraine between East and West, 174. Kiev was part of the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth since the sixteenth century. It passed under the suV. della Dora / Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016) 86e103 88 sketches provide us with a unique insight into Orthodox Enlightenment geography, not so much as a physical space or as a discipline, but as a discourse, that is, as a set of embodied and representational practices through which eighteenth-century educated Orthodox Ruthenians (the inhabitants of present-day Belarus and Ukraine) came to know, imagine and represent the world.15 A self-made Orthodox enlightener, Barskij moves us away from the Enlightenment of famous European thinkers (or influential Russian statesmen and clergy) and opens awindow on a deeper and more widespread layer of thought and practice that is intertwined with older traditions of pilgrimage and learning. More significantly, he challenges our sense of what ‘Enlightened’ could mean in eighteenth-century Europe. The goal of this article is three-fold. Firstly, it aims to contribute to debates on the geographies of Enlightenment and religion from a non-Western ‘bottom-up’ perspective. Secondly, it aims to explore the role of Orthodox Enlightenment in shaping perceptions and representations of space and place, and to show how tensions between critical enquiry and Orthodox tradition were negotiated by Barskij through narrative and visual strategies. Finally, taking a biographical approach, it aims to capture Barskij's lifelong process of becoming an Orthodox enlightener. The first two, and more historiographic, sections of this article place Barskij and his travels within the historical context of the reforms instituted by Peter the Great and within the geographies of the Orthodox Enlightenment, its networks, and its characteristic syncretisms. The following sections analyze Barskij's accounts and sketches, with specific reference to his two journeys to Mount Athos in Greece, one of the most sacred places in the Orthodox world. By focusing on the role of the eyewitness, clear vision and light in Barskij's textual and visual narrative, these sections trace a unique blend of Enlightenment ‘ways of seeing’ and pre-modern pilgrimage traditions and representations of space. Sight and light operate as persuasive and pervasive metaphors for sensuous and spiritual knowledge at the core of the Orthodox Enlightenment. Sight and light also signpost the transformations Barskij underwent from the start to the close of his lifelong pilgrimage. Using Steve Daniels and Catherine Nash's metaphor of the ‘lifepath’ as a bridge between geography and biography, we can thus imagine Barskij's journeys as a lifepath running through Athos and the Christian East and linking shrines and centres for learning with an ongoing inner process of self-illumination and moral progress e the ultimate goal for every Orthodox enlightener.16 Between East and West: the Kiev Mohyla Academy and the Petrine reforms Barskij is not an easy character to pin down. Some scholars have referred to him as a devout Orthodox pilgrim; others as an Enlightenment traveller; others as some sort of explorer; others as an ‘ambulant scholar’; others as a talented artist; others as a fond antiquarian; others as ‘a cultural geographer of his time’; others 15 Withers, Placing the Enlightenment, 12. 16 S. Daniels and C. Nash, Lifepaths: geography and biography, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 449e458. 17 K. Kolesnyk, The Strategies of Self-Representation in the Travel Notes of Vasyl Hryhorovych-Bars'ky, unpublished MA dissertation, Central European University, Budapest, 2014; I. Sevcenko, Ukraine between East and West, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 16 (1992) 182; Grishin, A Byzantine pilgrim; P. Doukellis, Apό thn 4ysikή kai thn qrhskεytikή gεugra4ίa sta mοnasthriakά tοpίa. Basίli-Gkrhgkόrοbit2 Мpάrski, 1st International Conference Н Κύprο2 stο stayrοdrόmi tun anazhtήsεun cartοgrά4un kai pεrihghtώn apό tοn 15ο έu2 tοn 20ο aiώna, Sylvia Ioannou Foundation, Athens, October 2012. Podcast available at http://www.sylviaioannoufoundation.org/; http://infokava.com/travel/10617-pervyy-ukrainskiyputeshestvennik-vasiliy-grigorovich-barskiy.html. even as a philosopher.17 To different extents, Barskij fits and yet at the same time transcends each one of these categories. In a sense, he embodies and epitomizes the ambiguities and the hybridities of the Orthodox Enlightenment culture in which he moved and thrived. The geographical setting of Barskij's upbringing contributed to his hybrid, multifaceted personality. Split between the Orthodox Russian Empire and the Roman Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, eighteenth-century Ukraine, and Kiev in particular, was a cultural crossroads between East and West, as its Byzantine churches externally covered with western Baroquestyle accretions still remind visitors today.18 Starting in the fourteenth century, Western influence over the region became especially intense in the sixteenth century and continued well into the late eighteenth century. Over these centuries, Jesuits introduced the use of Latin and new pedagogical methods which were appropriated by the Orthodox Church. While attentive to defending the dogmas of their doctrine fromwhat they considered heretical and schismatic beliefs, Ruthenian Orthodox clergy embraced Catholic instructional methods, language and belleslettres to the point that, as Ihor Sevcenko has noted, ‘the struggle against the seemingly invincible West was waged officially in the name of Greek faith of the forebears, but, in fact, it was waged with the help of the same weapons to which the West owed its successors’.19 The key institution in this contested world was the Kiev Mohyla Academy, where Barskij studied theology. The Academy was born from the vision of Peter Mohyla, the Metropolitan of Kiev (1627e1646) and head of the newly restored Orthodox Church in Ruthenia.20 A native of Moldavia schooled in Poland, Mohyla has been defined as a man ‘of many worlds’ and many facets: a pious Orthodox believer and loyal subject to the Catholic Polish king, archbishop of the Orthodox Church and diligent follower of Jesuit educational practices, a scholar equally at home in Patristic literature and Greek mythology.21 At a time when Jesuit education went hand in hand with conversion to Catholicism, Mohyla's ambition was to create an institution that could compete with its leading Catholic counterparts, and thus make it unnecessary to send Orthodox students to the West for higher education. The establishment of Mohyla's school in 1632 when Kiev was under the Polish crown has been interpreted as a manoeuvre to contest the Counter-Reformation.22 However, in a Catholic commonwealth in which the Orthodox faithful were subject to discrimination and even persecution, Mohyla understood that no steady development was possible for the Orthodox Church without a cross-fertilization with Western culture.23 His goal was thus to help his students ‘master the intellectual skills and learning of contemporary Europe and to apply them to the defense of the zerainty of Moscow in 1686. 19 Sevcenko, Ukraine between East and West, 177. 20 The Orthodox Church in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was legally restored in 1633. Since the establishment of the Uniate Church in Ruthenia in 1596 (by a group of former Orthodox bishops who accepted union with Rome), the Orthodox Church virtually ceased to exist for the Polish state and all its churches and properties were forfeited and transferred to the Uniates. For a detailed account, see L. Charipova, Latin Books and the Eastern Orthodox Clerical Elite in Kiev, 1632e1780, Manchester, 2006, 17e35. 21 I. Sevchenko, The many worlds of Peter Mohyla, in: I. Sevchenko, Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century, Edmonton, 1996, 164e186. Charipova, Latin Books, 39. 22 J. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man, 1670e1752, Oxford, 2013, 306. 23 Charipova, Latin Books, 34. V. della Dora / Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016) 86e103 89 Orthodox faith’.24 Degradation and discrimination, he believed, could only to be combated through education. In his 1631 declaration of intent he wrote: I, Peter Mohyla ... having recognized the great distress of the Orthodox Church brought forth by the clergy's ignorance and lack of enlightenment among the youth ... bid to overcome this deficiency.... I have resolved to found schools, so that the youth may be properly enlightened in piety, virtuous habits and the liberal arts.25 Besides acknowledging the superiority of Jesuit organization and training over traditional Orthodox monastic schools, Mohyla also recognized the necessity of teaching Latin, the official language of the state.26 Looked at with suspicion by Orthodox zealots for its Western character and feared by the Jesuits as a dangerous competitor, the school was nonetheless immensely successful and attracted students from all parts of the commonwealth and beyond.27 Raised to the status of an academy, by the early eighteenth century it had become the leading centre of higher studies in the Slavic Orthodox world. Barskij thus studied in an Orthodox institution that followed the Jesuit model, with Latin as the primary language of instruction and scholasticism as a key approach to learning. The academy enjoyed links with Polish Jesuit schools and German Protestant universities, and many of its staff were part of a republic of letters which included both German pietists and Protestant enlighteners.28 The theology course typically lasted four years and was taught by Ruthenian scholars who had received their first education at the academy and then in the leading centres of Catholic Europe. The theology course was preceded by a three-year philosophy course. It was usually taught by the same instructors to the same students and placed strong emphasis on empiricism and inductive reasoning. Philosophy was conceived of as an introduction to theology, which was in turn regarded as ‘the ultimate science, as the systematic investigation of the content of belief by means of reason enlightened by faith’.29 Students were thus discouraged from studying philosophy ‘for the sake of itself’. From an Orthodox perspective, the study of secular subjects was pedagogically necessary, but futile on its own. As Metropolitan Platon of Moscow argued later in the century, ‘without prayer and piety all human endeavors are empty. ... Education allows the child to enter into himself through knowledge, to know his Creator, and to know the 24 Encyclopedia of Ukraine, http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp? linkpath1⁄4pages\K\Y\KyivanMohylaAcademy.htm (accessed on 7 November 2015). Of course, Mohyla was not the only one who adopted the ‘weapons’ of the adversary in defense of Orthodoxy. Patriarch of Constantinople Cyril Loukaris (1572e1638), for example, opposed Roman Catholic teaching by employing the theories of Calvin. See J. Cracraft, Theology at the Kiev Academy during its golden age, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 8 (1984) 78. 25 Quoted in Charipova, Latin Books, 47. 26 Orthodox Ruthenians needed a knowledge of Greek and Church Slavonic for religious purposes. However, for political activity, Mohyla argued, they needed not only Polish, but also Latin: ‘In both chambers of parliament, in the courts, in dealings with the crown, in all political matters, Ruthenians, as crown citizens, should know both these languages .... It would be neither right nor decorous for a Ruthenian to speak Greek or Slavonic before a member of the senate or diet and would be taken for a stranger or a simpleton. Even in explaining matters of faith, one should be able to give a reply in the language in which one is asked the question’. See Sevcenko, The many worlds of Peter Moyhla, 171. 27 Initially, the school was only allowed the title of collegium for fear of competition with Jesuit institutions. However, in 1701 it was officially upgraded to ‘academy’. 28 Kolesnyk, Strategies of Self-representation, 31. 29 Cracraft, Theology at the Kiev Academy, 75e78. 30 Quoted in Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment, 42. purpose of creation’.30 The academy, it has been observed, was pivotal in shaping a Ukrainian consciousness. It provided an alternative to the Polonization of the Ruthenian elite while at the same time delaying its Russification until the late seventeenth century.31 However, when Kiev came under the suzerainty of Moscow in 1686, the local patriotism attached to the academy was replaced by Russian patriotism, or rather by the notion of an ‘all-Russian oneness’.32 As a result Barskij identified himself as a ‘Russian’ and as a member of the Moscow Church. More significantly, at the close of the seventeenth century the academy began to have a direct effect on ecclesiastical and political affairs in Moscow. Notoriously, the academy schooled Bishop Feofan Prokopovich (1681e1736), Peter the Great's chief adviser in ecclesiastical, cultural and propaganda matters, and the mastermind of his ecclesiastical reforms (or Spiritual Regulation) of 1721. These reformswere part of the tsar's plan to modernize Russia according to Western patterns. Caught up from a young age in the scientific and technological upheaval emanating from western Europe, Peter enacted what many have called a cultural revolution. While his chief priority always remained the enhancement of Russia's imperial power and its armed forces, Peter also understood that transformation into a modern state presupposed the creation of new scientific institutions, the importation of technicians and scholars from western Europe (including Germans and Dutch), as well as drastic reforms to the existing education system and Church administration. The Spiritual Regulation replaced the Moscow Patriarchate with an Ecclesiastical College (later renamed Holy Synod), whose members were clergy directly appointed by the monarch. This in effect brought the Church under the tsar's control, reducing it to a manageable sphere of governance.33 Like Peter Mohyla, Bishop Feofan was ‘a man of many worlds’. Before joining the Kiev academy he spent time studying in Rome, and to do so he temporarily converted to Catholicism. The owner of a private library of three thousand books, Feofan possessed competency in Latin and Greek, a good teaching knowledge of Descartes, Leibniz and Wolff, and a keen interest in central European trends like Socinianism and Halle Pietism. His openness towards the West was reflected in the ecclesiastical reforms. The concept of the Ecclesiastical College, for example, was inspired by SwedishLutheran models of governance, whereas the well-known Protestant appeal to the scriptural principle of the priesthood of all believers (1 Cor. 12:12e13; 1 Pet. 2:9) was used to fend off the idea that clergy was superior to laity.34 The ecclesiastical reforms also rationalized monasteries and raised the minimum age for men entering one to fifty, in order to increase the number of recruits for the army.35 They also set as a key target the fight against superstition, or those practices and beliefs that did not conform to Christian law and were deemed 31 Sevcenko, The many worlds of Peter Mohyla, 184. 32 Sevcenko, The many worlds of Peter Mohyla, 183. 33 J. Cracraft, The Petrine Revolution in Russian Culture, Cambridge, MA and London, 2004, 172e182. Not only had candidate clergy to swear loyalty to the sovereign, but they also had to report any opposition they might discover, even when hearing confession (a clear violation of the canon law which prohibited priests from divulging anything heard in confession). 34 V. Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution, Oxford, 2004, 18. 35 This reform was justified by Feofan on the ground that Byzantine emperors (whose heir Peter proclaimed himself to be) ‘had been too lenient in the matter of allowing monks to move from remote places into the towns. This had resulted in their being insufficiently self-supporting and idle’. He and his colleagues went as far as to partly ascribe the Fall of Constantinople to ‘the excessive number of monks’, see Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 308. This claim is reminiscent of the thesis about the fall of the Eastern Empire later developed by Gibbon. V. della Dora / Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016) 86e103 90 ‘superfluous, not essential to salvation’.36 According to Feofan, the defeat of superstition and ignorance was the precondition for a more orderly and more Orthodox society. For the bishop the promotion of sciences, the study of Latin and Greek, and the war on superstition mattered ‘just as much as the struggle against libertinism and atheism’.37 While obvious parallels can be drawn with other moderate Enlightenments, the Orthodox conception of what was deemed superfluous to salvationwas clearly different from the Protestant, for example. The Spiritual Regulation, for instance, did not deny the existence of wonder-working icons, nor did it condemn their veneration; its preoccupation was rather with ‘false miracles’. It is against this background that Barskij's accounts should be read. 42 O. Katsiard e-Hering, Аpό thn Οqumanikή katάkthsh u2 thn εdraίush tοy nεοεllhnikού krάtοy2, in: І. Hasiot es, O. Katsiard e-Hering and E. Ampatz e (Eds), Οi ο2 ο2 Barskij's geographies of knowledge Barskij enrolled in theMohyla Kiev Academy in 1715 or 1716, but he never completed his degree. He wrote that he had to interrupt his studies because of a huge ulcer which appeared in his leg and which local doctors were unable to cure. In 1723 he thus left his native Kiev for Lviv, a main centre in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth famous for its surgeons. He was hoping to get cured there and to continue his studies in the city's renown Jesuit college. Studying abroad was a common pattern for Kievan students in the eighteenth century. By that time the academy had developed a strong language programme and many of its students often continued their education outside the country, requiring conversion from Orthodoxy to Roman Catholicism. Upon their return to Ukraine, these students would turn back to Orthodoxy and attain positions in the clergy or academia (like Bishop Feofan). By sending students abroad for education, the academy played a pivotal role in transmitting western European knowledge to Ukraine and Russia.38 Barskij's fate, however, took a different course. His leg was healed in Lviv, but he only spent few days at the Jesuit college. The institution only accepted Catholic students, and Barskij, who was Orthodox and had tried to disguise himself as a Polish Uniate (a member of the Eastern Catholic Church), was soon discovered and expelled, ‘like a wolf from the forests of Kiev’.39 At this point, rather than returning home, Barskij decided to travel and ‘see other cities, other people and other customs’.40 Travel for self-enlightenment was encouraged in the Petrine period. In 1717 Bishop Feofan regarded travel abroad as part of a sound education and argued that a sensible man ‘sees also in foreign nations, as in a mirror, himself and his own people, both their good points and their bad’.41 Motivated by an insatiable thirst for learning, Barskij thus set out on his lifelong journey through Europe and the Ottoman Empire (Fig. 1). In the course of his peregrinations hemoved through a transnational network of Orthodox communities and centres of learning. These communities (particularly in western Europe) often shared a hybrid cosmopolitan character akin to the Kiev Mohyla Academy. Not only did they serve 36 Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy, 19. 37 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 308. 38 N. Barsoukof, Вίο2 kai έrga В. Gkrhgkοrόbit2 Мpάrski, in: P. Mylona (Ed.), Мpάrski, 64e66; M. Sharpe and F. Kortschmaryk, The Kievan Academy and Its Role in the Organization of Russia at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century, New York, 1976. As Wirtschafter, Religion and Enlightenment, 124e125 comments, ‘in the reign of Tsar Peter I (1682e1725) ... Europe had become the perceived centre of intellectual progress, and to be “modern” required the adoption of knowledge from Europe’. 39 Quoted in Barsoukof, Bίο2 kai έrga, 65. 40 Quoted in Mparski, Τa taxίdia stο Άgiοn Όrο2, 66. 41 Quoted in A. Grishin, Vasyl’ Hryhorovych Bars'kyi: an eighteenth-century Ukranian pilgrim in Italy, Harvard Ukrainian Studies 17 (1993) 9. as important nodes in post-Byzantine intellectual life, but, at different stages, they also represented important stations in Barskij's life and his pathway towards self-enlightenment. The Greek community of Venice, for example, was one of the most prosperous Greek communities outside the Ottoman Empire and a key node in the network of Diaph otismos and post-Byzantine education in general. It included a sixteenth-century cathedral decorated by Cretan and Venetian artists, a nunnery, a hospice for the poor and the Flanginian Institute, an ecclesiastical school established in 1664 and linked to the University of Padua. Located in the heart of one of the main centres for printing Greek books, the institute played a crucial part in the development and spread of the Greek Enlightenment. Its curriculum encompassed advanced philosophy, rhetoric, philology and logic, and amidst its teaching staff and students were key figures of the Diaph otismos, such as Theophilos Korydaleus and Eugenios Voulgaris.42 As an Orthodox traveller, Barskij was offered hospitality in the community twice, despite the fact that he did not speak Greek. During his second stay he attended church services and was allowed to audit some of the classes in the school. He also started to study Greek, which would become a lifelong commitment. While the Greek community of Venice was a fundamental benchmark in Barskij's intellectual development, his formation as an Orthodox enlightener took place mainly in the course of his journeys through the eastern Mediterranean. In 1734 Barskij was tonsured monk by the Patriarch of Antioch Sylvester the Cypriot. Under Sylvester's protection, he spent substantial periods of time in Tripoli and above all on the island of Patmos to further his studies and knowledge of Greek. In those years he effectively became an agent of the Diaph otismos, as the patriarch sent him on repeated missions to Egypt, Cyprus and the Aegean islands. Barskij spent the most extended period of his otherwise erratic journeys in the theological school of Patmos, the main centre for ecclesiastical education in Greece. By this stage he had come to master the Greek language and also taught Latin to local children. He even produced a Latin grammar for Greek speakers.43 Barskij's immersion in the Greek Diaph otismos had an impact on his writing. Besides becoming increasingly critical in the evaluation of sources, it has been noted how over this period he grew more and more interested in antiquarianism and ethnography.44 More significantly, however, he increasingly came to appreciate the value of education as a ‘common good’ benefitting society rather than just the individual. Barskij describes Father Makarios Kalogeras, the founder of the Patmos school and his old teacher, as the model hero of Orthodox Enlightenment, combining, as he did, monastic humbleness and charity with knowledge and erudition. Through his work, Barskij argued, Makarios ‘illumined [not just] the small and humiliated island [of Patmos]’, but ‘almost the whole of Έllhnε2 sth Diaspοrά 15 e21 ai, Athens, 2006, 47e50. On the connections between Greek and Russian Enlightenments, see Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 318e325. 43 The Patmos school (Patmiada), where Barskij was based from 1737 to 1743, was established in 1713. See M. Malandrakis, Н Patmiάda Scοlή, Athens, 1911; A. Grishin, Bars'kyj and the Orthodox community, in: M. Angold (Ed.), The Cambridge History of Christianity, Cambridge, 2006, 224. Barskij's Latin grammar is lost to us. In 1749, two years after Barskij's death, monks from Mount Athos founded a school near the Monastery of Vatopedi, which would later be named Athonias Ecclesiastical Academy and attracted many students from the whole of the Orthodox world. From 1753 to 1759 Voulgaris was appointed director of the school, see Batalden, Catherine II's Greek Prelate. 44 A. Grishin, Bars'kyi's account of the monasteries of Cyprus: a Ukrainian pilgrim in early eighteenth-century Cyprus, Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 10/11 (1994/