The opening of the Tauride Department of the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society through the prism of the personalities of the ruling bishops: Bishop Mikhail (Gribanovsky) and Archbishop Nikolai (Ziorov)

The article analyzes the creation (and activity in the first year of its appearance) of the Tauride Department, a structural unit of one of the oldest public organizations - the Imperial Orthodox Palestinian Society (hereinafter referred to as the IOPS MOO, or IOPS). The subject field of research includes the study of the issue through the prism of the personalities of the ruling Tauride bishops - Mikhail Gribanovsky and Nikolai Ziorov. The study is based on a wide and diverse source foundation, which makes up the body of unpublished sources, pre-revolutionary church periodicals, and the epistolary heritage of pre-revolutionary figures of the IOPS. The degree of development of the topic, on the contrary, is modest in its nomenclature due to the particular measurement and the extreme narrowness of the chronological framework of the study, covering 1897-1900. It is represented by a small group of scientists belonging to Russian historiography - the master in the study of pilgrimage S.Yu. Zhitenev, Rostov researcher I.G. Sharkov, our Simferopol (and now St. Petersburg) colleague V.V. Kalinovsky, as well as modest author's research of previous years. When using general scientific and concrete historical methods, preference was given to techniques for working with text sources of an official and speech nature - content and event analysis. The author of the article made the first detailed attempt at a phased semantic reconstruction in modern historiography, which, of course, gives it absolute novelty, supplemented by scrupulous verification of what is happening from several types of sources. The work can be informative for everyone interested in the history of IOPS (its structural units in the field), Crimean studies, pilgrimage practice and missionary activities in the Holy Land. In the course of the study, the author confirms the hypothesis put forward by him about the lack of Russianness in the Tauride province, which is now faced by the direct successor of traditions and the successor of the pre-revolutionary Tauride department - the modern Crimean regional branch of the organization. The set goal and the tasks being solved made it possible to identify similarities in the cultural and historical field and in the pressing problems facing the regional structure of the organization in diachron planes. Comparative analysis made it possible to conclude that the Crimean regional branch at the present stage has a lesser degree of interaction with the Simferopol and Crimean metropolis, while the pre-revolutionary Tauride department was controlled by the Chairmen, who were in the first hand, ruling the Tauride bishops.