Journey as an opening of space: the crimean vacations of the late 19th - the early 20th century (by the example of the family of Dmitriy Burilin, Ivanovo-voznyesensk manufacturer and maecenas)

At the beginning of the nineteenth century journeys to the Crimea had only been coming into fashion among the Russian nobility, and by the end of the century this tendency had spread beyond aristocratic avocations. The Crimea became popular among merchants and manufacturers, philistines and clerks. The article studies the circumstances of the Crimean vacations of the family of Dmitriy Burilin at the turn of the nineteenth — the twentieth century´s. Dmitriy Burilin (1852-1924) was a manufacturer, Maecenas, collector, and founder of a museum in Ivanovo-Voznyesensk. He was a distinguished public figure of the Russian province at the turn of the centuries. His family travelled a lot through the country and abroad. The Crimea was a favorite place of the Burilins´ vacations. While at the very beginning of the 1900s the Crimean peninsula had served as a starting point of their voyages through Southern Europe (by the steamships of the Russian company of trade and steamship in Sevastopol), in the 1910s the Burilins opened the Southern part of the Crimea and stayed there for a long time. The family were coming there for health, to know about ancient and medieval history. Those journeys also served as family education. The Burilins visited Yalta several times, stayed at fashionable hotels of that time — «Metropol» and «Russia». During their vacations in Alupka and Gurzuf they had been treated by the leading doctors of that time. In Feodosiya Dmitriy Burilin had seen the works of Ivan Aivazovsky for the first time. Later he became the worshipper of Aivazovsky´s works and added some of them to his collection. The source base of the research consists of the Burilins´ correspondence, containing in the collection of the Ivanovo state historical museum.