In 1817, Agustín José Pedro del Carmen Domingo de Candelaria de Betancourt y Molina (known in Russian as Avgustin Betankur) surveyed the site of one of his most important engineering projects, the future Nizhnii Novgorod Trade Fair. In this episode, we move from Betankur's impressive architectural designs to daily life at the fair, tracing the ribaldry, revelry, and rampuctiousness that made this fair one of the marvels of the Russian Empire.
Source: A. Lincoln Fitzpatrick, The Great Russian Fair: Nizhnii Novgorod, 1840-90 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).
On Easter morning 1831, Joseph Major was murdered in his Urals home. A Scottish engineer, he had lived for 26 years in the gateway...
In the early nineteenth century, Raffaele Scassi, Genoese gambler and ne'er-do-well, found himself in the newly founded Black Sea port of Odessa. This was...
Andrei and Natalia Chikhachev, middling nobles, spent their lives running their small estate of Dorozhaevo in Vladimir province and raising their family. In this...