Our Notes & References

Eye-witness, detailed study of the peoples and their cultures in the south-east territories of modern-day Ukraine.

First edition, in the preferred hand-coloured version, complete with all plates and the folding map showing the area comprised between Perekop and Mariopol.

The Swiss missionary and ethnographer Daniel Schlatter (1791-1870) visited the southern Russian Empire and the north coast of the Azov Sea three times, in 1822, 1825-1826 and 1828, travelling through Crimea, Odessa, Kherson and Molochna Mennonite Colony (now in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine), describing various local tribes and communities on the way.

The main subject of his observations here are the Nagai Tatars, Europe’s last nomadic people and “still little known and described Europeans”, as the author notes in the preface. Descendants from various Mongolic and Turkic tribes, Nogai tatars originally resided in the Astrakhan region but were pushed to the Crimean peninsula and then to the areas northeast of the Azov Sea, southeast Ukraine and the Caucasus after the Russian invasions in the mid-16th century and late 18th century respectively.

Schlatter “found himself a position as a servant in a Nogay Tatar home, shed his western clothing in favour of Nogay robes, and pursued the religious enlightenment of his host” (Kalmakoff). He meticulously documented very diverse aspects of their life, including their language, history, housing, all kinds of food and drinks (with a coloured plate showing an extensive kitchen), home remedies, clothing, “women’s employment”, child upbringing, schools, names, money, system of measurement, entertainment, and even insult words, physiognomy and temperaments. He additionally wrote a table of varying pronunciations of local geographic names. A few pages are dedicated to religion, with a focus on the Quran and Islam.

During his time in the Molochna River Region, Schlatter also observed German Mennonite colonies and the religious sect of Dukhobortsy: he “recorded his observations during a period of rapid and profound transition within the Dukhobortsy colony [due to the change of its leadership in 1820]. Schlatter’s writings […] are among the very few sources of published information for this little-known and little-explored period of Doukhobor history” (Kalmakoff).

The boldly coloured lithographs show Nogai Tatars from different backgrounds highlighted by their diverse costumes, horses, scenes of everyday life in their house interiors, a Tatar Market on a folding plate, and examples of Tatar and Turkic writing. The detailed map shows the 1829 layout of the Tauric (Crimean) Governorate territories to the north of the Azov Sea and the small part of the Ekaterinoslav governorate (modern-day Donetsk region, Ukraine) to the north-east. The Tauric governorate is divided into counties (“Melitopol”, “Aleksandrowsky” and “Nieprowsky”), German colonies and lands resided by the Nogai Tatars, Mennonites, as well as the lands of counts Nikolai Mordvinov, Vasilii Popov and Vasilii Orlov-Denisov, later formed into cities in the south-east Ukraine.

Provenance

From the estate of Prof. Philip Longworth (1933-2021, historian and writer, esp. on Russian history).

Bibliography

Colas 2666; Hiler p.782; Lipperheide 1354; Cat. Russica S-511; Vladislav Gribovskiii, “Daniel Shlatter i Iogann Kornis: druzhba, vrazhda, teksty” // Knizhnoe delo na Severnom Kavkaze: metody, istochniki, opyt issledovanii. Vyp. 9. Sbornik statei / red.-sost.: E. D. Lomanovskaia, A. I. Slutskii. Rostov-na-Donu: DGPU, 2018. pp. 87–99; Jonathan J. Kalmakoff, “The Dukhobortsy, 1822-1828”, Doukhobor Heritage.