During the reign of Alexei Mikhailovich, the Patriarch of Antioch Makarii, an Arab from the city of Aleppo, came to Russia twice for the first time to collect donations, and in the second - ten years later - at the invitation of the tsar for the trial of Patriarch Nikon. On his first visit with him was his own son, Archdeacon Paul of Aleppo, who, at the request of one of his Damascus friends, as he explains in the introduction, compiled a detailed and extremely curious description of his father's three-year journey.