“...Wishing to Go to Worship the Holy Places”: a Social Portrait of a Pilgrim in the second half of the 19th – early 20th centuries (based on materials from the Penza Province)

The article analyzes the social portrait of a pilgrim who traveled from Penza province to worship Orthodox Shrines in the East in the 1870s -1900s.The study is based on the Penza governor's office correspondence (which regulated the receipt of a foreign passport), articles from diocesan periodicals about the popularization of the pilgrimage movement, including travel notes by Penza priest P. Arkhangelsky, who visited Palestine in 1895.The motives, meaning, terms and conditions of the organization, and the cost of a trip to Palestine from the Penza province are investigated.The analysis of the pilgrims' petitions allows to reconstruct the system of ideas of the provincial society about the geography of the location, the name, and the content of the image of the Holy Land, to identify the relationship between the level of socio-cultural development of the territory and the awakening of the desire for spiritual and moral improvement.The desire to gain immortality encouraged deeply religious representatives of the lower strata of society, as a rule, rural residents in adulthood to travel to Holy Places, despite all the hardships and dangers of the way.It has been established that by the end of the XIX century, as a result of the activity of the IPPO (Imperial orthodox Palestinian society), increased transport accessibility, and the development of hospitality infrastructure in Jerusalem, the pilgrimage movement was democratized, and the socio-demographic characteristics of the classical pilgrim became more flexible.In addition to gaining personal experience through the pilgrimage movement, the memorial culture of the provincial society, the common basis of religious and national identity, was formed.