National Geographic 1917 "Young Russia"

On Saturday, October 31, 2026, the Carmel Institute organized a trip to the National Geographic Society’s Museum of Exploration. Professor Fedyashin gave the students a 60-minute tour of the NGS’s history, its Washington headquarters, and the highlights of its collection.

The tour explored the expeditions that the Society has supported over the past century and a half of its existence with a focus on Eastern Europe and northern Eurasia. Dr. Fedyashin’s students read the National Geographic Magazine’s special November 1914 edition titled "Young Russia: The Land of Unlimited Possibilities” (Volume XXVI, Number 5, November 1914). The magazine’s long-serving editor Gilbert S. Grosvenor travelled to the Russian Empire during the Great War, wrote the entire issue, and took many of the black-and-white as well as colored photographs that appeared in it.

The group discussed the highlights of the tour and explored the original copy of the “Young Russia” magazine issue over lunch.

Film screenings, museum visits, concert attendance, and study trips have been part of the Carmel Institute’s programming since its inception. As Professor Fedyashin has always reminded his students, although our knowledge about the past depends primarily on reading, history must also be walked, seen, touched, smelled, and tasted.

The Culture of Eastern Orthodoxy: Byzantine Influences on Russian Orthodoxy

In June of 2026, the Carmel Institute sponsored a class-trip to Istanbul, Türkiye, for a group of students from AU, Trinity, Harvard, and Miami University of Ohio. It explored the legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantine Orthodoxy.

Before arriving in Istanbul, the students read Thomas Madden’s Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World (2016) and selections from Geffert & Stavrou’s Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts (2016). The course combined discussions of the books with visits to churches, museums, mosques, and archaeological sites in Istanbul and beyond. In the process, the students explored the history of the Byzantine Empire, the evolution of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the interconfessional relations throughout the late classical, medieval, and modern eras.