ИСТИНА

In my paper, I am going to investigate how the Russian academics, journalists, secular and Church officials perceived two traditional institutions of the Near Eastern and Balkan region, the sociopolitical structures of the Ottoman empire and the Constantinople Patriarchate. The paper will cover the views of prominent figures of Russian political and intellectual life, including Constantine Leontiev, Professors Ivan Troitskii and Ivan Sokolov, Metropolitan Antonii (Khrapovitskii), and others. For all these intellectuals, as I seek to demonstrate, their impressions and notions of the Near Eastern and Balkan institutes served as an instrument of deeper understanding of the peculiar problems of Russian domestic development. They also used these notions as a material while constructing the projects of the transformation of Russian social, political, and ecclesiastical institutes. The paper will thus elucidate an important and previously neglected aspect of the inter-cultural connections and exchanges which took place in the second half of nineteenth – early twentieth century.