Northern Citadel

In the great, forested zone of the Russian north, waterways have served from prehistoric times as the main arteries of trade and commerce.  Among the most important of these links is the White Lake (Beloe ozero) and the Sheksna River, which flows southward from it.  Modern reservoir and canal construction has greatly altered the appearance of the Sheksna, but it still serves as a major transportation route connecting the Volga River with Lake Onega. Each summer, thousands of tourists travel the river in large cruise boats that operate between Moscow and St. Petersburg.  If time is no object, these river journeys provide an excellent introduction to the landscape of the Russian north.

As part of the Sheksna route, most of the cruise vessels dock at the small town of Goritsy, whose inhabitants offer various handicrafts for sale.  The town also has an ancient religious ensemble, the Goritsky Resurrection Convent, that played a significant role in Muscovite history during the turbulent reign of Ivan the Terrible.  However, few tourists are aware of this monument, part of which is now under the care of the Russian Orthodox Church and is being slowly restored.  Instead, the tourist buses head some ten kilometers eastward, over paved road to another, far larger monastic ensemble, the St. Cyril-Belozersk Monastery, which this June will observe its six hundredth anniversary.

ounded in 1397 by Cyril (Kirill), a monk of noble origins from Moscow’s Simonov Monastery, the St. Cyril-Belozersk Monastery is located on Siverskoe Lake, not far from the Sheksna River and the great White Lake. Paradoxically, the location was both remote and strategically important. With the revival of monasticism in Moscow during the fourteenth century, pioneer monks deliberately sought remote areas as a test of their ascetic faith and dedication. At the same time, Muscovite princes supported these efforts not only to spread and maintain the Orthodox faith, but also to protect Moscow’s territorial expansion into the Far North, with its rich forests.  Thus, the Belozersk Monastery founded by Cyril received major donations that, by the sixteenth century, made it one of the largest of Russian monasteries, second in size only to the Trinity-St. Sergius Monastery near Moscow. Indeed, both of these monasteries played a significant role in defending Russian territory during the Time of Troubles, at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

In all of Russia, there are few more imposing sights than the walls and massive towers of the St. Cyril Monastery.  In contrast to other major, Russian monasteries, it does not have a great cathedral or bell tower as its central point.  This area of the North was too sparsely inhabited to justify large church construction.  The first of its brick structures, the modest Dormition Cathedral (1496), has been much altered, as have most of the monastery’s other churches and chapels, built during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.  Some two decades later, the monastery gained a brick Church of the Presentation (1519), which had a refectory, or dining hall, attached to it in the Russian monastic tradition.  And in the 1530s, yet another brick structure, the Church of Archangel Gabriel, was constructed between the earlier two churches with funds provided by Moscow’s Grand Prince Vasilii III. In 1528, Vasilii had made a pilgrimage to the monastery with his second wife, Elena Glinskaya, to pray for the birth of a male heir. The subsequent birth of Ivan IV (later known as Grozny – “the Terrible”) ensured that the monastery would benefit from the largesse of both father and son.

With an increase in the wealth of the monastery, which owned several villages in the nearby area, a second monastery, dedicated to John the Baptist, was founded on adjacent territory. Its first brick building, the Church of John the Baptist, was erected at the same time as the Archangel Gabriel Church and dedicated to the patron saint of the newly-born Ivan IV.  Therefore, what is known as the St. Cyril-Belozersk Monastery is actually composed of two monasteries (the Dormition and John the Baptist), as well as a settlement for lay workers protected by an ever expanding system of walls.  During the reign of Ivan the Terrible, a brick Church of St. John Climacus was built above the north gates to the Dormition Monastery, and a refectory Church of St. Sergius of Radonezh was built at the center of the adjacent John the Baptist Monastery.  Although a few other brick structures were added by the end of the sixteenth century, most of the buildings within the monastic compound continued to be built of logs.

During the dynastic interregnum known as the Time of Troubles, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the monks began to strengthen the walls in preparation for a possible invasion.  Nonetheless, they were caught by surprise in August of 1612, when a raiding detachment burned many of the monastery’s service buildings.  When a stronger Polish force returned in December, the monks, who – in the Russian tradition – served as soldiers when necessary, managed to repulse several attacks and soon broke the attempted siege. The invaders continued to raid the surrounding territory, however, for the next three years.

With the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Russia slowly recovered from the enormous devastation suffered during the Time of Troubles.  The St. Cyril Monastery played an essential role in restoring stability to the area and brought a modest economic revival to the surrounding villages and farms.

A major surge in the monastery’s fortunes occurred in the middle of the seventeenth century, when Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovich decided to rebuild the monastery as an impregnable monument to Moscow’s dominance in the north. In 1653, he decreed the expansion of the monastery’s walls and provided what was at the time the vast sum of 45,000 rubles for their construction. Hence, the brick fortress walls and massive corner towers rose over a period of several decades throughout the latter part of the seventeenth century.

Ironically, no hostile army ever came close to the rebuilt citadel.  Its walls and towers only served as testimony to the Russian ability to erect masonry structures of enormous extent during the late medieval period. But in the seventeenth century, there was no assurance that this strategic point might not suffer another prolonged siege, like that inflicted by Polish-Lithuanian forces in 1612.  By the middle of the seventeenth century, the most likely enemy was Sweden, which had already gained considerable territory that had been held in medieval times by the city-state of Novgorod. If Sweden attempted a deep invasion, the St. Cyril Monastery would stand as a mighty obstacle.

In fact, Russia became involved in a major war with Sweden at the turn of the eighteenth century, but the actions of young Tsar Peter I turned the conflict further west, to the area of the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea. And, upon the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 as Russia’s citadel in the West, Peter stripped his realm of master masons, such as those who were completing the walls of St. Cyril Monastery, in order to erect his new city on the Neva River. With this turn of events, the St. Cyril Monastery lost much of its former strategic importance, along with the resources necessary to continue its building program.  Peter, after all, was interested in diverting the Orthodox Church’s resources to his own purposes and would hardly contribute to the restoration of monastic wealth.

The declining importance of the St. Cyril Monastery continued through the eighteenth century, although it gained one major structure with the construction of a central bell tower in 1757-1761.  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the great expanse of the increasingly impoverished monastery had become a liability for the church, which could no longer afford to maintain many of the monastic buildings. Indeed, in 1800, Metropolitan Gavriil of Novgorod, in whose domain the St. Cyril Monastery lay, decreed that a number of the oldest churches should be razed rather than  restored. (A further irony:  the monastery that had served to consolidate Moscow’s hold over the North, at the expense of Novgorod, was now threatened by an administrative decree from a high church official in Novgorod.)

But there was little money even to demolish the churches, and the buildings of the St. Cyril Monastery simply fell into further decay, or were clumsily modified and rebuilt. Only with the revival of Russians’ interest in their medieval history during the nineteenth century did a concern for preserving ancient monuments finally lead to their reappraisal and, where possible, their restoration.  As a part of this process, a number of educated monks did invaluable work in recording and compiling a historic record of important monasteries.  But the question of physical preservation remained a difficult issue.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, Communist authorities inflicted great damage on the church as a whole, but certain major religious monuments were turned into museums.  Although this fate no doubt saved the St. Cyril Monastery from utter devastation, funds for its preservation were never adequate.  Only through the dedicated efforts of early museum directors, did the first museum in the St. Cyril Monastery open in 1929. The onslaught of Stalinist industrialization and ideological repression undercut much of this valuable work and led to great material losses, such as the melting down of the monastery’s remarkable, priceless bell ensemble – one of the most important in all Russia.

Only after the Second World War did the museum regain something of its cultural potential. In 1953, architectural restoration moved onto a new level with the arrival of the architect and scholar Sergei Podiapolskii, who, for a period of over four decades, has made extraordinary contributions, in both Moscow and the North, to the study and restoration of medieval Russian architecture. The museum is now under the direction of Galina Ivanova, who, with her colleagues, must steer a difficult course though times of economic uncertainty. There is no doubt of the monastery’s continued importance as a repository of Russian cultural treasures.  But without persistent advocacy, such institutions will not obtain the support they need.  For this reason alone, the celebration of the monastery’s 600th anniversary is a major event that reminds of the heroic fate of this citadel of the Russian North.