Bashmakov, A.A.: History and Ethnography of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica

Title

Tripolitaniia i Kirenaika v otnoshenii ikh istorii i etnografii, Sankt-Peterburg 1912

History and Ethnography of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica

Keywords

Summary

The essay covers the history of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, with a brief incursion into Bashmakov’s days. After an introduction about the geography of the region, the author retraces the stages of historical settlements and dominations over the territory. Bashmakov lingers on the various local “types”, reconstructing their background and presumed characteristics. He bases his treaty on Western sources, both contemporary and not (Herodotus, for instance), which he lists in the footnotes. The essay features illustrations, as well as a map of the region.

Bio

Aleksandr Bashmakov was a writer, ethnographer and jurist, a member of the Pan-Slavist movement. Born in Odessa into a Swiss family, he obtained Russian citizenship only in 1877 following a petition of the governor of Kherson, A.D. Bashmakov, who had adopted Aleksandr and his siblings after the death of their parents. He studied in Geneva and Odessa, graduating from the faculty of Law. He served in Bulgaria for a few years, prior to moving back to Odessa where he continued to pursue a legal career, becoming the legal advisor of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1898). He travelled quite extensively through Europe, the Balkans, Altai, writing essays with an ethnographic orientation. He recorded a trip he made to Egypt and Sudan in the periodicals “Rossiia” and “Pravitel’stvennyi vestnik” (1910). He published many of his works, especially those in journals and newspapers, under the pseudonym “Veshchii Oleg” (Oleg the Wise). After the 1917 Revolution he left Russia for Turkey, Serbia and finally France, where he worked as a lecturer at the Higher School of Anthropology in Paris. During the emigration years he published books and articles in French.

Sources

“Bashmakov Aleksandr Aleksandrovich”, in Rossiiskoe zarubezh’e vo Frantsii (1919-2000). Biograficheskii slovar’, t. 1, ed. by L. Mnukhina, M. Avril’, Moskva 2008, p. 127;

M. Beklemisheva, A.A. Bashmakov (1858-1943): obshchestvenno-politicheskie vzgliady i deiatel’nost’ v dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii, PhD dissertation, Moskva 2021.

A.F.

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