ОБЩІЙ ВИДЪ СВ. ГРАДА ІЕРУСАЛИМА [General View of the Holy City of Jerusalem].

Description

The Odessa edition of Aece Hage’s revered view of Ottoman Jerusalem.

This is a scarce chromolithographic bird’s-eye view of the Old City of Jerusalem, compiled in 1896 by the Boston-based Palestinian-American businessman Aece Hage. Printed in Odessa in the late imperial period, this version of this seminal sheet was intended for Russian Orthodox pilgrims to the Holy Land. The view is oriented west, as seen from a vantage point on the Mount of Olives or in the Kidron Valley. This perspective ensures that the Temple Mount’s dramatic golden dome dominates the foreground of the city’s skyline. The Russian title reads ОБЩІЙ ВИДЪ СВ. ГРАДА ІЕРУСАЛИМА (General View of the Holy City of Jerusalem) with subsidiary titles in Arabic (top right): القدس الشريف (al-Quds al-Sharīf), and in French (vertical, left margin): VUE GÉNÉRALE DE LA VILLE DE JÉRUSALEM.

Census

The present view was first issued in 1896 and was produced in multiple editions and states, with a variety of partners. This included an Americanized version published in collaboration with Rand McNally (c.1900), which added Christianizing elements such as a prominent Jesus figure. Some states are rarer and more collectible than others, making exact identification crucial.

This edition is best identified by the imprint in the lower right corner, which reads: Хромо–литография А–го О–ва Н. Т. Корчакъ–Новицкаго въ Одессѣ (Chromolithography of the Joint-Stock Company of N. T. Korchak-Novitsky in Odessa). The publisher is identified in printed blue text at the very bottom of the sheet: Изданіе Афонскаго Свято Ильинскаго скита (Publication of the Athonite Holy [Prophet] Elijah Skete).

Unlike the Rand McNally adaptations, the Russian edition retained the original Aece Hage composition, making it visually distinct from its American counterparts. The strongest diagnostics, nevertheless, are the imprint and the publication line. There are three so-called Odessa editions.

The original Russian edition was published by E.I. Fesenko in 1898 and was followed by a second edition in 1902. In 1908, the third and final state was issued under a new lithographer. Known as the Korchak-Novitsky issue, this included subtle alterations in the composition’s staffage. The publication date is not printed on the sheet, but recorded in Russian bibliographic archives (click here).

The composition is organized in three bands, each achieving different effects:

Foreground: Approaching the Holy City

The lowest band shows the green landscape just outside the eastern wall. A procession of figures and riders moves along paths in the valley, animating the view and lending it the peregrine rhythm associated with pilgrimage. The massive eastern fortification wall runs horizontally across the sheet, only punctuated by a salient tower and the gate on the right side of the composition. This is not neutral topography: the foreground is a narrative threshold, and Jerusalem is both a destination, a promise, and the culmination of a devotional passage. The legend reinforces this threshold logic by characterizing the valley as “strewn with tombs” and linking it to the pilgrim trail up to Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives. In other words, the print teaches viewers how to enter Jerusalem both historically and devotionally.

Middle ground: The Temple Mount as confessional and architectural fulcrum

At the center of both the middle band and the composition as a whole is the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, depicted as a green precinct filled with trees and buildings. Dominating it is the great dome of the Qubbat al-Sakhra or Dome of the Rock. The legend labels it as such (Куббет Эс–Сахра) and notes the colloquial use of Omar’s mosque (Омарова мечеть). On the left of the image is the Mosque of al-Aqsa. The vocabulary of the legend is revealing: Muslim structures are described with transliterated Arabic names filtered through Russian orthography, and the platform is explicitly linked to both Islamic sanctity and the memory of Solomon’s Temple.

The print’s visual strategy is subtle but deliberate. The Temple Mount is presented as a lush, ordered sanctuary, with the bright dome drawing the eye as the sheet’s chromatic and symbolic center. Even though the Odessa variant of this view was reconfigured to be understood within a framework of Christian Orthodox pilgrimage, it is not rendered as an imposed enclave, but rather as part of Jerusalem’s sanctity as a whole.

Background: Jerusalem’s roofscape and the hierarchy of shrines

Beyond the Temple Mount, the city rises in a dense field of pale stone buildings and domes. This roofscape creates an effect that is both documentary and idealized: on the one hand, it reads as authentic architecture, while, at the same time, “the city” is simply aggregated into a sacred urban mass.

Two landmarks stand out in this field of domes and rooftops. First is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Храм Воскресенія или Св. Гроба Господня), positioned near the compositional center (keyed in the legend as location 1, and with its bell tower as location 2). This is the composition’s Christological anchor: through the legend’s careful sequencing of sites, Jerusalem is defined outward from the Resurrection site. The second stand-out feature is the Russian presence, which has been both visually and textually enlarged. Locations 3 and 4 identify the Russian Holy Trinity Cathedral complex and a broad category of “Russian buildings,” which include the consulate, the ecclesiastical mission, and the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IPPO), with its hospices. The “Russian buildings” occupy a conspicuous portion of the plan and are undoubtedly a deliberate choice that turns this otherwise innocuous panorama into a manifestation of imperial Russia’s institutional footprint in the Holy Land.

At the bottom of the sheet, we find the legend to which we have referred several times. This provides a numbered key identifying the Old City’s principal sites. In addition to the symbolic elements discussed above, the key serves a didactic purpose, guiding pilgrims (including armchair pilgrims) through Jerusalem’s confessional geography while highlighting the Russian institutional presence.

The locations included in the keyed legend are:

1. The Church of the Resurrection or Holy Sepulchre.

2. The bell tower of the Holy Sepulchre.

3. The Russian Cathedral Church of the Holy Trinity.

4. The Russian compound, including consulate, ecclesiastical mission, hospices, and Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society.

5. The Anglican Church and Protestant missions.

6. The Turkish (Saljuq) citadel with the Tower of David.

7. The “Armenian Quarter” (Patriarchate, monasteries, and hospices).

8. The synagogues and buildings of the “Jewish Quarter”.

9. The Mosque of al-Aqsa on the southern side of the Haram al-Sharif.

10. The minaret near the Western or “Wailing” Wall.

11. Kubbet es-Sakhra or Dome of the Rock.

12. The Megkeme-Nebi-Daud or Judgment Seat of the Prophet David.

13. The eastern wall of the platform of Solomon’s Temple.

14. Route of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem.

15. St. Stephen’s Gate, also called the Gate of Gethsemane.

Context is Everything

To understand why this view takes this form, one must place it in the context of Russian pilgrimage at the end of the nineteenth century. Odessa was not just a port; it was the principal funnel through which Russian pilgrims traveled to the eastern Mediterranean. Prints such as this served as portable Jerusalems. They were devotional images, geographic surrogates, and subtle affirmations that the Holy Land was within Russia’s spiritual and institutional reach.

The Athonite Holy Elijah Skete was deeply implicated in that infrastructure. Sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on Orthodox printed icons note the Skete’s role as a commissioning body and link it directly to the Odessa-based production and distribution networks that served pilgrims. In this light, the publisher’s line “Publication of the Athonite Holy Elijah Skete” is not a pious flourish. It signals an organization that had both the motive and the means to disseminate visually compelling imagery of the Holy Land to a receptive audience.

Historiographically, this sheet also belongs to a fascinating chain of transmission. Although the underlying composition was the Boston-printed chromolithograph (1896) by the Palestinian émigré Aece Hage, this variant was clearly intended for a Russian audience. Similarly, it is evident that the Rand McNally variant was adopted for the American public. In other words, we are dealing with an image that moved from an Arabic-speaking Christian diaspora in Boston, through one of America’s leading cartographic publishers, and into the sphere of Russian imperial religious publishing. All while remaining recognizably the “same” Jerusalem view.