The present study attempts to present the Russian traveler’s view of Constantinople, based on Andrey Muravyov’s Journey to the Holy Places in 1830 and Letters from the East. When the writer first saw the former capital of Byzantium, he was enchanted by the panorama of the city he could admire from the sea. However, when he stepped ashore, he experienced disappointment with Istanbul’s realities. According to the writer’s idea of Tsargrad as the New Jerusalem, for him its holy center was the Hagia Sophia. In Muravyov’s descriptions, the orthodox cathedral is a kind of an “in‑between” place, a borderland sphere where two orders, Christian and Islamic, intermingle. He saw the church as a Christian object, although it had been converted into a mosque. The paper uses the xenological reflections of the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels to demonstrate that although Tsargrad in Muravyov’s work is a place that is “foreign”, since it is located outside its own area, belonging to another state, it is at the same time a space that is “one’s own” for religious reasons.