Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery — monastery
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Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery

  • 2 min read
  • 59.857° N 38.369° E

Interesting facts

  • The cathedral's original iconostasis, made together with the building, survives almost complete, a rarity in Russian art; its 60 icons were later split between Kirillov and major museums.
  • A monk of the monastery, Efrosin, produced the final version of the Zadonshchina, the poem on the Battle of Kulikovo, and gave it its title.
  • The library grew from about 210 manuscripts at the end of the fifteenth century to 1,065 handwritten and printed books by 1601.
  • At its height the monastery owned some 607 villages, second only to the Trinity Lavra among Russia's church landowners.
  • The mystic Nil Sorsky, a monk here, left to found his own hermitage on the nearby Sora River.
  • Among the exiles held here was Simeon Bekbulatovich, the baptised Tatar prince whom Ivan the Terrible briefly installed as nominal ruler of Russia.
  • The monastery kept its own compound inside the Moscow Kremlin, near the Spasskaya Tower, until it was demolished in 1776.
  • The French engineer who began the walls, Jean de Gron, was known in Russian records as Anton Granovsky.
  • Around 1906 a monk proposed opening a museum at the monastery, but the authorities refused, calling it no business for monks.
  • A wooden church from the village of Borodava, dated to the 1480s and among the oldest surviving wooden churches in Russia, now stands inside the walls.

Why it is worth it

Seen from Lake Siverskoye, the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery looks less like a cloister than a walled city: a chain of towers and ramparts encloses domes, belfries and courtyards right on the shore. From the 15th to the 17th century it was among the largest monasteries of the Russian North and one of its strongest fortresses, and the town of Kirillov grew up from the settlement at its gates.

It began in 1397, when the monk Kirill, a former head of Moscow's Simonov Monastery and a disciple of Sergius of Radonezh, dug himself a cave by the lake and put up a small wooden chapel. Moscow's rulers soon valued the community as an outpost on the northern trade routes, and by the 16th century it was the second-largest monastic landowner in Russia. Ivan the Terrible kept a cell here and planned to take vows within its walls. The monastery also held fallen grandees in exile, among them Patriarch Nikon and the boyar Boris Morozov, and in December 1612 it withstood a siege by Polish-Lithuanian irregulars.

Behind the walls lie two separate monasteries with eleven churches, most of them from the 16th century. By the water, the Dormition Cathedral, built by masters from Rostov in 1497, was the largest monastery church raised in Russia up to that time; its 17th-century iconostasis rises in five tiers above silver Holy Doors given by Tsar Alexis in 1645. The smaller Ivanovsky monastery is dedicated to St John the Baptist, patron saint of Ivan the Terrible. Its chapel of St Vladimir, built over the grave of Prince Vorotynsky and enlarged in 1623, is considered the first family mausoleum in Russia, and the gate church of St Sergius (1560–94) keeps 16th-century frescoes uncovered during Soviet restoration.

The great walls, 732 metres long and 7 metres thick, went up between 1654 and 1680, the largest fortress built in Muscovy after the Time of Troubles. The French engineer Jean de Gron started the work, but the monks rejected his Western-looking design and Russian masters finished it, giving each tower its own shape. Around 1924 the monastery became a museum, which still holds most of the site; monks returned to the Ivanovsky monastery in 1998.

Getting there

The monastery stands in the town of Kirillov in Vologda Oblast, on the shore of Lake Siverskoye. The nearest larger town is Sheksna, about 73 km away. The nearest airport is Cherepovets Airport (CEE), about 68 km away.

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On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Russia 73The Most Beautiful Monasteries in Russia 7The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Russia 23The Most Beautiful Monasteries 79The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery, known in English as White Lake St. Cyril's Monastery, is a male monastery of the Vologda Eparchy of the Russian Orthodox Church, located on the shore of Lake Siverskoye within the town of Kirillov, Russia which developed from a settlement (sloboda) that grew around the monastery. In the 15th to 17th centuries, it was one of the largest monasteries and most fortified fortresses in the Russian North.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

59.85722, 38.36861per Wikidata