4 - Sentimental pilgrims

Summary

But where was that Caucasus?

Ilya Radozhitsky

Not long after young Pushkin's trip of 1820, the Caucasus began acquiring the status of a Russian tourist attraction. As implied by the lone traveler passing safely through canyons at the end of “The Prisoner of the Caucasus”, Ermolov's campaigns in Chechnia and Dagestan seemed to have secured a new realm for pleasure trips. The perception was well conveyed in Ilya Radozhitsky's récit de voyage which provides the epigraph to this chapter. At the outset of his military service in the Caucasus, Radozhitsky declared that the territory was now firmly under the tsarist “scepter of art and science”. To his mind, steady Russian protection had transformed Georgia in particular into an “Italy” of peace and tranquillity. With the same beguiling promise of new opportunities for tourism, National Annals (Otechestvennye zapiski) in 1822 ran a guide for travel across the mountains. This publication maintained that the Georgian Military Highway was now quite safe, despite pockets of “predatory” tribes.

But if even Georgia seemed newly accessible, Russian tourism was in fact concentrated at spas in the Piatigorsk area, suitably distant from battlefields. In the course of the 1820s and early 1830s the Caucasian cure became so fashionable among upper-class Russians that one of them likened the practice to a Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. Rudimentary facilities for using the mineral springs gradually gave way to well-appointed installations, as Pushkin would observe with evident dissatisfaction in 1829 when he passed through the region a second time en route to Turkey. By the early 1830s a landscaped hotel and bath houses, fountains, pavilions and shops greeted civilian visitors and the tsarist soldiers who were sent to the spas to recuperate from wounds or illness.