John-Paul Ghobrial, is a Cambridge historian who is working on the life of Elias of Babylon, a 17th century Christian traveler from Mesopotamia. He describes his project as ‘a microhistory about the first Ottoman traveller to South America, ca. 1670′ [see my blog post of March 22, 2012].
John-Paul has been following Elias’s footsteps around Spain for the last few weeks, and he recently sent an update:
Dear Amitav,
I’m just back from a month of archive-hopping in Spain. The good news is that I managed to track down several of my needles in a haystack, in the form of more Eastern Christians in the Americas. More importantly, I figured out that Elias spent the end of his life in a coastal town near Cadiz and. . . . I found a notary register FULL of documents about him. As for the bad news, well. . . see attached.
You will understand what I mean when I tell you I used good old fashioned geniza techniques to figure out what letters I was looking at in an attempt to decipher partial words.
Heart-breaking in many ways but it all adds to the story, I guess.
