Solovetsky Monastery

Listen first. The cry of gulls rises over the walls, sharp and constant, carried on a cold wind off the White Sea. Under your feet the ground is uneven, part gravel, part old stone. Ahead of you stands a wall built from boulders, rounded and grey, some of them larger than a car. Lichen in orange and pale green spreads across their surfaces. This is Solovetsky Monastery, on the largest island of an archipelago far in the Russian north.

The Solovetsky Islands sit in the White Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean, not far below the Arctic Circle. For much of the year the sea around them freezes or fills with drifting ice. Boats can reach the islands mostly in the warmer months. That isolation explains almost everything about this place. Monks came here to be far from the world. Later, rulers sent people here for the same reason... to keep them far from it.

The story begins in the fifteenth century. According to monastic tradition, two monks named Savvatiy and German first settled on the island in the 1420s or 1430s. After Savvatiy died, German returned with a younger monk called Zosima. Together they built the first wooden cells and a small church. Zosima became the first abbot. Today Zosima and Savvatiy are honoured as the founding saints of Solovki, and you will see their images on icons across the monastery.

From those wooden beginnings, the community grew into one of the wealthiest monasteries in northern Russia. Salt was the key. The monks boiled seawater along the coasts of the White Sea and traded the salt across the region. They also fished, kept cattle, and worked the forests. With that income came stone buildings. Some of the oldest stone churches here date from the sixteenth century, a time of great ambition for the monastery.

Much of that ambition belonged to one man. In the mid sixteenth century the abbot was Philip, from the noble Kolychev family. Under his leadership the monks built stone churches, a refectory, and a network of canals linking dozens of lakes on the island. The Transfiguration Cathedral, with its tall white walls, rose during his time. Later Philip became Metropolitan of Moscow. He spoke out against the cruelty of Ivan the Terrible, and he was killed while in exile.

Now look again at the walls around you. They were built at the end of the sixteenth century, when the monastery also served as a fortress on Russia's northern sea frontier. The builders used huge glacial boulders, left on the island by ancient ice sheets. They stacked them in lower courses and topped them with brick. The towers have wooden roofs, steep and dark. Walk close and touch the stone. Each boulder is a different shape, fitted by hand.

Those walls were tested more than once. In the seventeenth century, the Russian Church reformed its rituals under Patriarch Nikon. Many monks at Solovki refused the changes and kept the old ways. They became known as Old Believers, people who held to the earlier forms of worship. The tsar's troops besieged the monastery for years. Historical accounts say the siege ended in the 1670s, after a defector showed the soldiers a way inside. Many defenders were killed.

Here is a detail most visitors miss. In 1854, during the Crimean War, British warships sailed into the White Sea and fired on the monastery. The bombardment lasted for hours. The boulder walls held, and the monastery did not surrender. Monks and local people treated the outcome as a sign of divine protection. If you look carefully at the walls today, guides sometimes point out marks said to come from that attack.

The monastery also had a darker role, long before the twentieth century. For centuries it held a prison. The state and the church sent religious dissenters and political opponents here, sometimes for life. Cells were cut into the walls and towers. Some prisoners lived in small, cold, dark spaces for many years. The same remoteness that drew hermits made the island an ideal place to make a person disappear.

That history reached its worst point after the Russian Revolution. In the 1920s the Soviet authorities closed the monastery and created the Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp. It became one of the first large camps of what later grew into the Gulag, the Soviet system of forced labour camps. Priests, scholars, peasants, and political prisoners were sent here. Many died from cold, hunger, and violence. The writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn later described Solovki as the place where the Gulag system began.

So as you walk these courtyards, two stories sit side by side. One is of prayer, craft, and survival on the edge of the Arctic. The other is of suffering on a huge scale. Memorials on the island honour the camp victims. And in Moscow, a stone brought from Solovki stands on Lubyanka Square, near the former secret police headquarters. It marks the memory of all who suffered in Soviet repression.

In 1992 the Solovetsky Islands were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List as a cultural and historic site. Around the same time, monks returned. Monastic life started again in the early 1990s, after decades of silence. Today you may hear bells and see monks crossing the yard in black robes. Restoration work continues on the churches. You may notice scaffolding, fresh plaster, or newly painted domes beside older, weathered stone.

Before you go, turn toward the water. On one side of the monastery lies the Holy Lake, calm and dark. On the other side lies the bay of the White Sea. In summer the light lasts almost all night, and the sky stays pale long past midnight. Stand for a moment by the wall. Feel the cold in the stones. Listen to the gulls once more... and notice how small the monastery looks against the sea and sky.