| Date / Time | 21 October 2011 (Fri.) 17:30-19:30 |
|---|---|
| Venue | Room 304, 3rd Floor, ILCAA |
| Language | Russian, with Japanese interpretation by Prof. Norihiro Naganawa, SRC |
| Organized by | Core Project “Human Mobility and Formation of Plural Societies in the Middle East and the Muslim World” |
| Jointly sponsored by | Group 5, Major Regional Powers in Eurasia Project, SRC |
| Contact | FSC Office, ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, e-mail : fsc_office[at]aa.tufs.ac.jp; replace [at] with @ |
| Admission:Free |
- Dr. Elena Astafieva (Visiting Researcher, Slavic Research Center [SRC], Hokkaido University / Lecturer, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes [EPHE], France)
- “The presence of Russian Orthodox Church in Palestine: On the context of diplomacy and domestic politics of the Russian Empire, late 19th-early 20th centuries”
- Summary of the Lecture
Based on the new sources from the archives in Russia, France, the Vatican and Italy, I examine different modalities of the Russian presence in Palestine-Syria, and explore the activities of the institutions – diplomatic, religious, charitable, cultural – through which Russia exercised an influence in this region, during the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This is a new attempt to combine different types of historical research – the history of international relations and the history of religions as well as of cultural and scientific developments – in order to understand the complexity of relationships between Russia’s domestic and foreign policies, and to clarify the place of Russia in Palestine-Syria among the European powers interfering in the region. My presentation evolves from the following two questions. How did the presence in these Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the centre of three major world religions, enable the empire of the tsars vying with France, Britain, Germany, to strengthen its status as a great power not only in Palestine, but also in Europe? How did Russia’s political, religious and cultural presence in this region figure within a wider process of its construction and maintenance of the empire within and beyond its political borders? - Chair : Prof. Hidemitsu Kuroki (ILCAA)
