The Journey Beyond the Three Seas

Khozhdeniye za Tri Morya (The Journey Beyond the Three Seas) is Afanasy Nikitin’s first-person account of his 1468-74 travels through the Caspian, the Arabian Sea and the Black Sea — the three seas of the title — to Bahmani-ruled Deccan India. Written in old Russian with substantial passages in Persian, Arabic and Turkic phonetic transliteration, it is the earliest substantial direct Russian source on South Asia and one of the few outsider sources on fifteenth-century Bahmani court life, Vijayanagara, Deccan trade routes, caste observances and Krishna devotion. The manuscript was carried back to Moscow after Nikitin’s death near Smolensk, incorporated into the Trinity Chronicle (Lvov redaction, 15th-16th c.), and first printed by Nikolai Karamzin in 1821; it is a set-text in Russian school curricula to this day.