Solovetsky Monastery
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- In the 16th century Abbot Filipp Kolychev linked dozens of the island's lakes with canals, using the flowing water to drive the monastery's mills.
- The eight-year siege of 1668–1676 ended not by assault but through betrayal, when a monk showed the tsar's troops a way inside.
- For centuries the monastery also served as a state prison: from Ivan the Terrible's time until 1883, roughly 500 prisoners were held here.
- Some of its prison cells were cramped, tapering chambers about three metres long that narrowed to around a metre at the top.
- In 1854 the British frigates Brisk and Miranda shelled the monastery for about nine hours, but the boulder walls and treacherous shallows kept them off.
- By the 1660s the monastery owned 54 saltworks and ran fisheries, ironworks, mica mines and pearl fishing across the White Sea coast.
- In the 17th century around 350 monks lived here, supported by some 600 to 700 servants, craftsmen and peasants.
- The walls also held off Swedish raiders in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, long before the British fleet appeared.
- A fire in 1923 destroyed the bell tower's spire, and the Soviet authorities put a star where the cross had been; a new titanium cross went up in 2006.
- The monastery's walls and churches appear on the Russian 500-rouble banknote first issued in 1997.
Why it is worth it
On the shore of the largest of the Solovetsky Islands, in the White Sea, the monastery's walls rise from the water's edge: a ring of fortifications built from enormous rounded boulders, some weighing several tonnes, stacked up to 11 metres high and 4 to 6 metres thick, punctuated by towers. Behind them stand white churches and a tall bell tower, and the whole ensemble, grey stone, white walls, low northern light and open sea, looks less like a building than like a piece of the landscape.
Monastic life here began in 1429, when the monks Herman and Savvatiy of the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery settled on the uninhabited island; in 1436 Zosima founded the community formally, and the three are venerated as its founders. Most of its great buildings date from the sixteenth century: the Dormition Cathedral of 1552–1557, the Transfiguration Cathedral of 1556–1564, the Church of the Annunciation of 1596–1601, and the boulder walls themselves, raised between 1584 and 1594. The walls were tested more than once. From 1668 to 1676 the monks, refusing the church reforms of the time, held out against a tsarist siege, and on 6–7 July 1854, during the Crimean War, British warships bombarded the monastery without taking it.
The islands carry a heavier memory too. After the revolution the monastery was closed, and in the 1920s and 1930s it became the centre of the Solovki prison camp, one of the earliest forced-labour camps of what grew into the Gulag system; a great many prisoners passed through it, and many did not survive. Monks returned after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in 1992 the monastery and the historic landscape of the archipelago were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Visitors today walk between the cathedrals and along the walls, and the places connected with the camp years belong to the same landscape and deserve the same attention.
Getting there
The islands have no practical road connection. In the summer navigation season, boats sail to the monastery pier from Rabocheostrovsk near the town of Kem, a crossing of about two hours; Kem has a railway station, and a bus links it with the port. Solovetsky has its own small airport, reached by flights from Arkhangelsk, the only regular route outside the navigation season. The nearest larger town on the mainland in a straight line is Segezha, about 158 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Solovetsky Monastery is a fortified monastery located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. It was one of the largest Christian citadels in northern Russia before it was converted into a Soviet prison and labor camp in 1926 to 1939, and served as a prototype for the camps of the Gulag system. The monastery has experienced several major changes and military sieges. Its most important structures date from the 16th century, when Filip Kolychev was its hegumen.
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