Sigirci Marina Anatolyevna

The article is devoted to an analysis of the Greek Orthodox cemetery in the Şişli district of Istanbul as a complex historical source for the history of the Russian presence and emigration on the Bosphorus fr om the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. The focus is on one of the largest and best-preserved Orthodox necropolises in the city, wh ere over the course of one and a half centuries the presence of people from Russia has been recorded — from pilgrims, diplomats, and clergy of the pre-revolutionary period to refugees of the first wave of emigration and their descendants.

The study is based on materials from cemetery registers and parish metric books of the Şişli Orthodox cemetery, as well as archival documents preserved in the archives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. It is shown that, in conditions of fragmentation, loss, and lack of description of state, consular, and émigré archives, necropolis-related and church documents in many cases constitute the only sources recording the fact of residence, death, and burial places of subjects of the Russian Empire in Constantinople-Istanbul during the Ottoman and Republican periods.

Special attention is given to the source-study specificity of the necropolis complex, including the combination of material sources (tombstones and epitaphs) and documentary materials, issues of preservation, transliteration and linguistic distortions, as well as practices of reuse of burial sites. The article concludes that the Greek Orthodox cemetery in Şişli has high scholarly value, making it possible to reconstruct migration, demographic, and socio-legal aspects of the history of the Russian abroad and to expand the chronological and territorial framework of research on Russian emigration in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey.