In the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of Russian pilgrims began travelling to the Holy Land each year, most of them people of modest means who arrived by sea and walked inland. To receive them, the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission built at a scale nothing else matched: entire compounds with churches, hospices, refectories, hospitals and gardens, laid out as self-contained quarters within and beside the cities. Their architecture is instantly recognisable — a distinctive vocabulary of domes, belfries, arcaded ranges and cut stone that carries the visual signature of Russian Orthodoxy into a Levantine landscape. The mission also acquired and developed sites associated with the Gospel narrative, building churches and monasteries that remain among the most striking silhouettes in the country. This programme follows that presence: the buildings, their liturgical life, their communities, and the story of a pilgrimage movement that shaped the modern urban landscape as much as it did religious life. Filmed in 4K, it offers broadcasters a strong transnational angle — a chapter of Russian history written in stone at the other end of the Mediterranean.
