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 the beginning of a remarkable career in Russian service that led to adventures in the Caucasian mountains, the rebuilding of a ruined Crimean town, and the preservation of ancient Greek relics. This episode explores his life and Russia's expansion to the south.
Sources: Heloisa Rojas Gomez, The Crimean Italians: A History of Mobility and Individual Agency on the Black Sea (PhD dissertation: European University Institute, 2020).
Heloisa Rojas Gomez, ‘Raffaele Scassi: Improvised Colonial Agent and the Appropriation of the Russian South, 1820s,' in D. Guignard and I. Seri-Hersch, eds., Spatial Appropriation in Modern Empires, 1820–1960: Beyond Dispossession (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), pp. 228–54.
Patricia Herlihy, Odessa: A History, 1794-1914 (Harvard University Press, 1986)
From the 1890s, the Russian Empire saw an outburst of interest in vegetarianism, especially since it was being propounded by famous figures like the...
In this episode, we look at the story of the oddly refined peasant wanderer Fedor Kuzmich, who was claimed by many to be the...
In 1704, Colonel Rudolph Felix Bauer found himself involved in the siege of Tartu, one of the many battles of the Great Northern War...
