Armenia: A year at Erzeroom, and on the frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia

Curzon, Robert, 1810-1873Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.9
Word count
327K words
Chapters
33

Tags

English Originals Historical GeographyTravel Human GeographyHistorical ReappraisalAdventure JourneyTravel Guide19th CenturyExotic CultureSocial ObservationFolk CustomsCross-Cultural View

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Armenia: A year at Erzeroom, and on the frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and PersiaAuthor: Curzon, Robert, 1810-1873,Language: English, Class: GB: Geography, Anthropology, Recreation: Physical geography, Release Date: Nov 26, 2018

Editor's review

Armenia: A year at Erzeroom, and on the frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia is an electronic reissue of Robert Curzon's nineteenth-century travel account, recording his observations during a year at Erzurum and in the border regions of Armenia and of Russia, Turkey and Persia. Part geography and part travel literature, the book offers first-hand descriptions of border towns, communications and ethnic distribution, making it a documentary text for understanding the nineteenth-century Caucasus and eastern Anatolia. The Gutenberg edition is an English public-domain e-book, easy to search for place names and persons, and suitable as supplementary reading for regional history, travel literature and imperial frontier studies. Note that the author writes from a colonial-era context and his perspective has period limitations; use it alongside later scholarship rather than as a direct basis for today's geopolitical realities.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the table of contents and chapter titles first to grasp the author's route, then read in sections following geographical clues.
  2. Use a modern map to mark Erzurum and the Russian-Turkish-Persian border places while reading, to reduce spatial confusion.
  3. Compare the author's period biases with modern research and read annotatively, rather than accepting a single account directly.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33

FAQ

Is this book about Armenian history? Not exactly. It is the author's travel account of a year's residence at Erzurum and journeys along the Russian, Turkish and Persian frontiers, touching on the geography and customs of the Armenian region, but it is not a systematic history of Armenia.
Who was Robert Curzon? Robert Curzon (1810–1873) was a nineteenth-century British traveler and writer; this book records what he saw in the eastern borderlands of the Ottoman Empire and is part of contemporary European frontier travel writing.
Can the information in the book still be used directly today? The geographical and cultural descriptions have documentary value, but the book was written in the nineteenth century; political borders, ethnic conditions and the author's perspective have all changed, so it should be used as historical material, not a contemporary guide.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Curzon, Robert, 1810-1873 Author

Robert Curzon (1810–1873) was a nineteenth-century British travel writer whose biographical details are rather limited in publicly available sources. Two of his works are held here, both centred on his travels in the Near East and western Asia. Visits to Monasteries in the Levant recounts his journeys to monasteries in the eastern Mediterranean, focusing on religious architecture, local customs, and scenes encountered along the way; Armenia: A Year at Erzeroom, and on the Frontiers of Russia, Turkey, and Persia is built around a year spent at Erzurum and offers geographical and cultural observations from the borderlands between Russia, Turkey, and Persia. The two books show his strength in describing the everyday life of frontier regions from first-hand experience, in a plain and concrete style, and they remain useful travel accounts for the study of the nineteenth-century Near East and the Caucasus borderlands.