Tickets for Burial in the Donskoy Monastery Necropolis in the 1770s as a Historical Source
| 24 September 2024
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Anniversaries
Devyatkov M.S.,
Elektrostal, Russian Federation
Tickets for Burial in the Donskoy Monastery Necropolis in the 1770s as a Historical Source
Abstract
The article attempts to estimate quantitative representation and social distribution of people that had been buried in the Moscow Donskoi monastery necropolis in the 1770s. Study of people’s interactions with monasteries (for funeral rites as well) in the pre-Petrine period is an established research topic in the Russian historiography. And yet there are little or no similar works on later periods, which increases the significance of studying of the representation of people buried in the Donskоi monastery necropolis. The monastery cemetery is known primarily as the burial place of Georgian tsars, Russian and Georgian princes and merchants. A few works by necropolists and genealogists are based mainly on field inspection of preserved gravestones. However the published data has been amended after studying the manuscripts of the Monastery archive. The author has discovered administrative documents, so-called “tickets” (bilets) that allow reconstruct the monastery bureaucratic procedures of burials. These documents help add to and correct the published information on the monastery cemetery: 62 persons out of 108 mentioned in the “tickets” have been previously unknown. The new data allows correct the estimations of the deceased social distribution, making it more “democratic”. The author concludes that multi-method research combining the study of publications, archives and the field inspection of gravestones proves most effective. The author contends that estimated representation of monastery cemeteries based on field inspection can’t be accurate without study of the monastery archives. Archives provide more accurate data on the families linked with monastery, as well as new data for historical demography, prosopography and the other historical disciplines.
Keywords
Source study, geneology, the Donskoi monastery, necropolis, Russian nobility, Georgian nobility, the Bagration tsar dinasty, social distribution of the buried, quantitative representation of the buried, plague in Moscow.
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About the authors
Devyatkov Maxim Semenovich, post-graduate student at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Elektrostal, Russian Federation, 8-916-918-28-25, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it