“Urgent Measures Should Be Taken to Refresh Knowledge about Turkey”: A.N. Samoylovich’s 1925 Business Trip

The business trip of A.N. Samoylovich to Turkey in 1925 has been covered very briefly in the literature on the scholar’s life and work. The authors usually limited themselves to merely stating the fact of the trip. Some details about Samoylovich’s stay in Turkey can be learned from his correspondence, published in 2008. New archival materials allow to reconstruct the events preceding the trip, identify its initiators and its connection with Academician V.V. Bartold’s trip to Istanbul in 1926. The article identifies the initiators of this trip, Samoylovich’s motivations, the tasks he performed in Turkey, and the significance of his trip for establishing academic contacts between Russian and Turkish researchers. The study is based on documents from the Saint Pe-tersburg branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences Archives, the Central State Archive of Saint Petersburg, and the Archives of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, as well as the scholars correspondence and publications about him. The author concludes that Samoylovich’s trip was initiated by himself personally and was primarily related to his desire to improve the curriculum at the Turkish department of the Leningrad Institute of Living Oriental Languages, where he was a professor. The Institute supported and financed the trip. The author of the article concludes that, in addition to the practical issues associated with his teaching activities, Samoylovich carried out a “reconnaissance of the academic landscape” of the new Turkey, preparing the “ground” for the subsequent visit of Academician Bartold to Istanbul in 1926.