Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius

The Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius is the most important monastery in Russia and the spiritual centre of the Russian Orthodox Church, a walled monastic town of cathedrals, bell towers and palaces on a hill in Sergiyev Posad. Its story begins in 1337, when the hermit Sergius of Radonezh built a small wooden church to the Holy Trinity in the forest here. Sergius became one of the most venerated saints in Russian history; his followers went on to found hundreds of monasteries, and he is remembered for blessing Prince Dmitry Donskoy before the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380.

The oldest stone building is the Trinity Cathedral of 1422, raised over the saint's grave, where his relics are still venerated by a steady stream of pilgrims. Its interior was painted by the greatest icon painters of medieval Russia, Andrei Rublev and Daniil Chyorny, and Rublev's Trinity, the most celebrated Russian icon, was made for this church. Nearby, the much larger Assumption Cathedral, commissioned by Ivan the Terrible in 1559 and consecrated in 1585, has an iconostasis of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and walls frescoed in 1684, and Tsar Boris Godunov and his family are buried there.

Around them the ensemble grew for four centuries. Stone walls about 1.5 km long with twelve towers replaced a wooden palisade in the mid-sixteenth century and held out against a sixteen-month Polish-Lithuanian siege in 1608 to 1610. The seventeenth century added the vast refectory of St. Sergius with its chequerboard painted façades, the tsars' palace and the five-domed Gate Church of St. John the Baptist. In the eighteenth century Empress Elizabeth raised the monastery to the rank of lavra, and a blue-and-white baroque bell tower about 88 metres high was built, still the landmark of the town.

The monastery was closed by the Soviet government in 1920 and returned to the Church in 1945, with services resuming in 1946. It is now home to more than 300 monks and a theological academy, and the ensemble was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. It is at once a museum, a pilgrimage site and a living monastery, and visitors should expect services, queues at the relics and a dress code.

Getting there

The Lavra stands in the centre of Sergiyev Posad, about 70 km northeast of Moscow along the road to Yaroslavl. Suburban trains run from Moscow's Yaroslavsky station, taking about 1 hour on express services and around 1.5 hours on regular ones; the monastery is a 10 to 15-minute walk from Sergiyev Posad station. Moscow's airports are the practical gateways; Zhukovsky (ZIA) is about 84 km away in a straight line. Travel to Russia is subject to restrictions and advisories in many countries, so check current conditions before planning a visit. Modest dress is expected.