Chukmaldin, N.M.: Travel Notes from Palestine and Egypt

Title

Putevye ocherki Palestiny i Egypta, Ekaterinburg 1899

Travel Notes from Palestine and Egypt

Keywords

Summary

Travel notes from Palestine and Egypt, divided into chapters according to the places the author visited. After Constantinople and Smyrna the author arrives in Alexandria, where he only stops for a day before getting on another ship to Jaffa. After “the pogrom made by the English” the city is being rebuilt, and looks clean and neat. After a trip to Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem, the author returns to Egypt and arrives in Port Said, which, however, he finds rather unattractive. He tries the water pipe and visits a local school, then goes to the pleasant Ismail. From here he takes a train to El Cairo, where he stops at Hotel d’Orient. In the city he visits the Mosque-Madrasa of Sultan Hasan and admires the cityscape from a panoramic spot. On the following day, he visits the pyramids and the sphinx, then goes to Memphis and Heliopolis. On the way to the former he stops to visit a tree where Mary and Joseph allegedly found shelter during their flee to Egypt. Subsequently, he cruises along the Nile and visits the Egyptian museum of Antiquities. Having heard of dervishes, he decides to attend one of their temples. He returns to Alexandria by train, noticing that approaching Alexandria reminds him of approaching Venice when the train crosses the laguna.

Bio

Nikolai Chukmaldin was a Russian merchant, author, and philanthropist. He was born in Kulakovo near Tiumen’, in a humble family of Old Believers. Having started his career as a counterman for the Reshetnikov merchants, Chukmaldin became an entrepreneur himself, trading wool, tea, leather, and grain. In the 1870s he moved to Moscow, where he continued his trade activities while maintaining connections with Tiumen’: as a matter of fact, in Kulakovo Chukmaldin built a school, a church, a bank, and a carpet factory. Furthermore, he supported Tyumen’s cultural institutions, among which the local museums. His travels across the Russian empire, including Crimea, North Caucasus, Transcaucasia, and Finland, as well as international destinations like Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Norway, Palestine, and Egypt, became the object of his books documenting these experiences.

Sources

N. Chukmaldin, Moi vospominaniia. Izbrannye proizvedeniia, Tiumen’ 1997;

A. Zhirov, Chukmaldin Nikolai Martemianovich, in Kratkaia entsiklopediia po istorii kupechestva i kommertsii Sibiri, v. 4 (2), Novosibirsk 1998, p. 123-125;

L. Bespalova, Iu. Bespalova, Chukmaldin Nikolai Martemianovich, in Bol’shaia Tiumenskaia Entsiklopediia, v. 3, Tiumen’ 2004, p. 401-402 https://www.prlib.ru/history/1327396.

M.E.