Eighteenth‐century Russian charts of the straits (Bosporus and Dardanelles)

Abstract

Russian depositories contain a corpus of large‐scale Russian manuscript coastal and navigational charts of the Straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles) compiled in the late 1770s either by naval officers in the field or by the Drawing Office of the Admiralty Board, St Petersburg. This mapping was undertaken after the Russo‐Turkish war of 1768–1774 in anticipation of further naval warfare in the Black and Aegean seas. The author of the earliest charts was Sergey Pleshcheyev, who conducted his surveys while a member of the Russian embassy in Constantinople. Additional hydrographical information was obtained during the voyages of Aleksey I. Timashev and Gavriil Glotov from the newly founded naval bases in the Black Sea. Between 1776 and 1779, a Russian squadron disguised as merchant ships attempted to chart the Straits. The Admiralty's Drawing Office, supervised by Ivan L. Golenishchev‐Kutuzov, then assembled the original drafts and summarized the collected data. The results are found in the Atlas of the Archipelago, engraved in 1781 and published in 1788.

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