Remembrance of the Borki Train Disaster in the Eparchial Part of “Faith and Reason”

Abstract

In the Russian empire of the 19th century, every important event in the life of the ruling dynasty became newsbreak for various periodicals. On October 17, 1888, all the carriages of the imperial train were wrecked at Borki (Kharkiv province and eparchy). There were 23 victims and 35 badly wounded in the disaster, but the emperor Alexander III, his wife and children escaped without serious injury. In the view of the state religion, this miraculous salvation was considered to be a divine blessing and was consequently immortalized in an hermitage near Borki, by charitable institutions, etc. The study of these practices can help amplify the lore about the politics of remembering and representations of memory about the sovereign. The case of the Kharkiv region, where the crash took place is scantily investigated. This work deals with the materials about the Romanovs’ survival, published in both official and unofficial parts of the main Orthodox magazine of the Kharkiv eparchy during 1889–1915. The author studies the contexts of all mentionings about the disaster and concludes that these publications were connected mainly with annual commemorative events near Borki, but they were not the essential part of each October issue.

Keywords

• kharkiv eparchy in 1889–1915
• commemoration
• russian empire
• romanov family
• saviour’s skete