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Solovetsky Monastery

Solovetsky Monastery was founded in the late 1429 by monks Herman and Savvatiy of Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery. In the XV'th and XVI'th centuries, when Marfa Boretskaya donated her lands at Kem and Summa to the monastery in 1450, the monastery quickly enlarged its estate, which was situated on the shores of the White Sea and the rivers falling into it. Solovetsky Monastery extended its producing and commercial activity, becoming an economic and political center of the White Sea region. Solovetsky Monastery's "business" activity included saltworks (in the 1660s, it owned 54 of them), seafood production, trapping, fishery, mica works, ironworks, pearl works etc., which had engaged many people dependent on the monastery.

By the 17th century, Solovetsky Monastery had already had some 350 monks, 600-700 servants, artisans and peasants. In the 1650s and 1660s, the monastery was one of the strongholds of the Raskol. The Solovetsky Monastery Uprising of 1668–1676 was aimed at Nikon's ecclesiastic reform and took on an anti-feudal nature. In 1765, Solovetsky Monastery became stauropegic (from the Greek stauros meaning "cross" and pegio meaning "to affirm"), i.e. it subordinated directly to the Synod.

Together with the Sumskoy and Kemsky stockades, Solovetsky Monastery represented an important frontier fortress with dozens of cannons and a strong garrison. In the 16th to 17th centuries, the monastery succeeded a number of times in repelling the attacks of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and the Swedes (in 1571, 1582 and 1611). During the Crimean War, Solovetsky Monastery was attacked by three English ships. After 9 hours of shelling on the 6 and 7 July, the vessels left with nothing.

Between the 16th and the early 20th centuries, the monastery was also a place of exile for the opponents of autocracy and official Orthodoxy and a center of Christianization in the north of Russia. The monastery also had a huge depository of manuscripts and old books. The pride of the monks was the monastery´s garden which had many exotic flora, such as the Tibetan wild roses presented to the monks by Agvan Dorzhij (Agvan Dorzhiev), a famous Buryatian Lama who was a member of Tibetan Karshog (Government) during the days of the Great 13th Dalai Lama.

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet authorities closed down the monastery and incorporated many of the buildings into Solovki, one of the earliest forced-labor camps of the GULAG during the 1920s and 1930s. The camp was mainly used for cutting trees, and when the trees were gone, the camp was closed. Before the Second World War, a sea cadet school was opened on the island.

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