The Monastery on Kiy Island:

Little Brother to Solovki

Relationships, they say, are intrinsic to the formation of character. So it has been with the Monastery of the Cross on Kiy Island. A dot in Russia’s White Sea, founded as one of patriarch Nikon’s triplets, sharing the vision of the Holy Land in Russia but sitting in the shadow of its bigger rival on Solovki. The story of the monastery on Kiy involves miracles of rescue and cure, political wrangles between tsar and patriarch, schism that rocked the Russian Orthodox Church and, finally, Soviet mismanagement. In every respect the Monastery of the Cross on Kiy reflected its founder, patriarch Nikon; when he died it dipped from its zenith, living quietly until disbanded in 1922.

Kiy island of course, had long been known to the peoples of the north. Apparently the word “kiy” in the language of the Saami means the tracks of wild animals or a deer. However, history has preferred the version of the “discovery” of Kiy island by Nikon, then a monk from the Anzer skete (Solovki). This is an adventure story in itself. Fleeing secretly at night in 1639 from Anzer, in a fishing boat, Nikon and his companions (nobody is sure how many there were, two or three perhaps), found themselves sucked into one of the White Sea’s unpredictable storms, the port of Onega, their destination, still 15 km away. Nikon’s prayers for safety were answered when the little boat was washed up on the south shore of an uninhabited island. Asking his companions in the local dialect, “Whose” or “What island is this?” “Kiy ostrov?”, the island received its name.

In gratitude for safe harbour, Nikon erected a large wooden cross on the island’s shore. As soon as weather permitted, he resumed his journey, making the short crossing from Kiy to Onega.

The row that had blown up between Nikon, future patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the monk Eleazar (founder of the skete on Anzer, the second largest island in the Solovetsky archipelago) was about money. The Anzer hermitage had been set up in protest against the worldliness of the monastery on Solovki and had been granted independence by the tsar who had been deeply impressed by Eleazar. In 1637, a year after Nikon had taken the tonsure on Anzer, he travelled to Moscow with Eleazar to ask for money to build a stone church on the island. They were given Rb500 but Nikon, it seems, was unhappy at the subsequent delays and made certain accusations that upset Eleazar who was holding the money. The argument reached such a pitch that Nikon decided to flee under cover of darkness. From Onega Nikon set out on foot for Kozheezersky monastery – still today one of the remotest and most difficult to access of Russia’s monasteries – arriving there sometime in 1640. In 1643 the brethren elected him father superior.

In the same year Nikon made what was supposed to be a short trip to Moscow on monastery business. It seems that the new young tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, known for his piety, took an instant liking to him. Everything was done to detain Nikon in Moscow, and he showed every sign of relishing his new role of advisor to his imperial majesty. In 1649 Nikon was established as metropolitan of Novgorod – a significant move up the ecclesiastical career ladder and one in which the hand of the tsar was evident. Using his new position, Nikon advised the tsar to bring the remains of three famous Solovetsky hierarchs to Moscow. His motivation for this may well have been rooted in his long-standing fight against what he saw as the dissolute and overly independent style of the Solovetsky monastery. One of the saints whose remains were to travel south on the orders of the tsar was St Philip Kolychev, builder of the stone cathedral and churches on Solovki, who used to serve liturgy dressed in the vestments of St Zosima.

In 1651, Nikon travelled to Solovki to accompany the holy remains of St Philip and two others to Moscow. Nikon journeyed by road and by water, taking a boat up the river Onega to the White Sea port of Onega. Remembering his lucky escape on Kiy island, he ordered his boat to put in to the south shore, where he found his wooden cross still standing. Local people told him of the miraculous cures effected on those who came to pray at the cross, fishermen told of being saved from storms by its mystical powers. By the time Nikon returned to Moscow with the remains of St Philip, the patriarch had died and the tsar had appointed Nikon in his place.

On 13th June 1656 Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich granted patriarch Nikon the right to build a monastery on the island of Kiy. This was at the peak of Nikon’s power as patriarch, when not only was he involved, with the tsar’s support, in pushing through liturgical and ritual reforms that would make Moscow fit to be the “Third Rome”, but was also flexing his muscles in a personal crusade to move the Church away from state interference and accrue to it powers that had, until then, lain in the secular domain. Perhaps, during the plague in Moscow of 1654, when Nikon had managed state affairs on behalf of the evacuated tsar, he had tasted secular power and was reluctant to hand back the reins. In gratitude for Nikon’s help during the emergency, the tsar conferred on him the title of Great Sovereign. However, Nikon’s excessive ambition was to lead to his eventual downfall.

In the same year, 1656, the new Kiy cross made its journey from Palestine to the north of Russia. This cross was part of Nikon’s vision of bringing the Holy Land to Russia, a vision that engendered three new monasteries each reflecting particularly holy places. The best known is the astonishingly beautiful Monastery of the Resurrection at New Jerusalem, outside Moscow, where Nikon recreated the heavenly city of Jerusalem with all its key Christian locations. The third monastery is the Iversk monastery on lakeValdai, the location for which was indicated to Nikon in a vision by St Philip of Solovki. The model for this monastery was the Iversk Monastery on Mount Athos. The monastery on Kiy island was built to house this cross, that Nikon had specially made from cypress wood in the Holy Land. It is said to be of the same size as the cross of Our Saviour. It was silver leafed, inlaid with precious stones and contained over 104 sacred relics. Today the museum at the New Jerusalem monastery houses a 19th century icon called the Exaltation of the True and Life-Giving Cross of the Lord, which shows Nikon raising the cross into position. Its journey through Russia was marked by replica crosses erected at each of its resting stages. The first of these was on the place of Golgotha in the cathedral at New Jerusalem (this cross was not an exact copy, having a carved depiction of the crucified Christ and no relics). The last of the replica crosses still stands in the Church of St Lazarus in the port of Onega.

In 1658, asked to leave Moscow by the tsar who by this time was exasperated with him, Nikon decided to dedicate himself to the completion of his three monasteries. In 1660 he made his third and final visit to Kiy island, bringing church bells, church plate and craftsmen. He spent almost a year on the island, during which the three main buildings were completed in stone, granite and brick. The buildings survive to this day, although in greatly damaged form. Some people claim that Nikon himself was the architect, others that it was Averkiy Mokeev, who built the Valdai-Iversk monastery. Another story tells that it was Nikon who found the source of drinking water on Kiy island and dug the first well which is now under the church of the Source of Pure Waters. Whatever the truth of these claims, there is no doubt that Nikon was very closely involved indeed with the day to day design and construction work. By this time, the famous and powerful Monastery of the Transfiguration on the neighbouring Solovetsky islands had formally rejected use of the revised liturgical texts and aligned itself with the Old Believers. Nikon felt the need to provide an alternative place of pilgrimage in the White Sea for the faithful followers of the Church’s reforms.

By 1661 Nikon was living permanently in his monastery at New Jerusalem where he stayed until he was officially removed from the position of patriarch and sent to live in Ferapontev monastery. Here he also built and spent money, causing a cruciform island to be built in the lake, where he would spend days on his knees praying before a large cross. Following the death of in 1676 of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, who had acted as Nikon’s protector against the more radical of his enemies, the new patriarch Joachim, could at last have Nikon forcibly removed even further from the seats of power, by sending him to be kept under permanent guard at the Kirillo-Belozersky monastery (St Savvatii, one of the founders of Solovki monastery came from here). Like many monasteries, Kirillo-Belozersky was used as a prison or place of exile throughout its history. Greatly upset at being parted from his architecturally stunning Resurrection Monastery at New Jerusalem, Nikon spent his time at Belorzersky petitioning to be allowed to return. Finally in 1681 his wish was granted, but sadly he died during the arduous journey south.

Meanwhile building at the monastery on Kiy island quietly continued, with new domestic blocks and cells being added until at the end of the seventeenth century it was more or less complete with, in addition to the three main stone buildings, a wooden fortified wall, a church over the entrance gates, domestic, storage and living quarters. Although Solovki officially capitulated and accepted reform in 1676, following years of military action, the lands bordering the White Sea which had belonged to and supported Solovki’s stand against Church reform continued to harbour pockets of Old Believers and from time to time disputes flared. The community on Kiy, at one time intended to become the alternative to Solovki, was attracting more and more new members, at one point reaching approximately 100 bretheren, but mostly numbering between 30 and 50. It became quite powerful at a local level, having 19 volosts (administrative areas) in its possession (and therefore able to extract tithes) and about five thousand peasants. As one of Russia’s outposts its fortified walls were furnished with cannon.

The monastery on Kiy was built on top of the island’s central hill, conceived to look like a natural extension of its landscape. The Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Cross, on the highest point, had the dual purpose, as do most island churches, of serving as a landmark to shipping negotiating the difficult Bay of Onega. The Konsky archipelago is made up of 11 rocky islands, of which Kiy is the largest. Kiy itself becomes enlarged at low tide, as causeways emerge linking it with its very close neighbours, the Pereimas. Kiy measures roughly 2.5km x 0.5km.

Kiy continued to flourish as a monastery despite Catherine II’s reforms which deprived monasteries of their lands. In 1760 the island was discovered by an English timber trader called Jingly Gom who had come to the Onega area attracted by vast timber resources and fortunes to be made. At about that time Catherine the Great’s government had passed a law limiting the involvement of foreigners in the lucrative northern Russian timber trade, but the law only covered the Dvina area, and so Gom was able to operate in the Onega region, using Kiy island as his loading bay and timber exchange. For several years Gom’s business operated and expanded, as did its reputation for making money, until he started amassing debts and it gradually became apparent that he had been milking the enterprise for years, making no return investment and allowing it to run down until, in 1783, he was declared bankrupt by the local authorities and the enterprise and timber exchange were taken over by the state. According to P.I. Chelischev, travelling in the area at that time, “One can only shudder seeing what harm this pernicious tramp has managed to do in fifteen years”. The large iron rings used to moor Gom’s ships can still be found protruding from the rocky shoreline of Kiy island.

Unfortunately the association with the English has not been a pleasant one for Kiy, as the next English visitors to arrive there on 9th July 1854 during the Crimean War were also interested in nothing but carrying away what they could. Luckily the island’s monks had been forewarned of the approaching enemy ships and had managed to secrete away the cathedral’s treasures, so that the disgruntled English found little to loot and had to content themselves with heaving the monastery’s two cannons into the well and tearing down Gom’s timber exchange and lumber stores. One wonders whether they realised that by a quirk of fate they were vandalising the only English property in the whole vast area? They also indulged in a little sport by shelling the peaceful outlying village of Lyamtsa from their ships. Today a cross on the shore at Lyamtsa commemorates this. Sadly, during its journey into temporary hiding, the Kiy cross suffered the loss of some of its holy relics which have never been recovered. A third visitation from Britain took place in 1917 when the British set up a long-range gunnery on Kiy to bolster the Whites during the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution.

In 1922 the monastery was dissolved by the Soviet government and a children’s home was installed in its buildings. Although during its history, Kiy, like many other monasteries throughout the land, had been used as a place of exile (for example, in 1730 the defrocked Bishop Lev Yurlov of Voronezh was imprisoned there for 13 years), during the Soviet years it escaped the horrific fate of neighbouring Solovki which was turned into a concentration camp. In fact, in 1924, just one year after the special concentration camp with its unimaginably cruel regime had been set up on Solovki, just down the road, so to speak, on Kiy, the monastery was turned into the first “dom otdykha” or house of rest – a holiday destination for Soviet bureaucrats and privileged workers. When, in the summer of 1924 holidaymakers were sitting on the beaches of Kiy looking towards the open White Sea and Solovki, their neighbours were being worked and starved to death, arbitrarily tortured and shot. The physical harm done to the monastery’s buildings however, was no less shameful than that caused to those of Solovki by the gulag. The interior of the Cathedral of the Exaltation of the Cross was ripped out and whitewashed, turned into a club, later a cinema. During the war years, when asked to provide bricks for the war effort, the director of the house of rest decided that it would be easier (and cheaper) to demolish the bell tower. Unfortunately it turned out that seventeenth bricks were not up to twentieth century requirements – most of them disintegrated as the building was knocked down. Faced with a pile of useless, crumbling bricks, the director ordered them to be dumped inside the empty, and by now roofless, remaining lower half of the belltower. This is where they remain to this day.

And what of the Kiy cross, to house which the splendid cathedral of the Exaltation of the Cross had been built? In 1923 it was removed from the island when the monastery was closed. Some years later it re-emerged on permanent exhibition in the anti-religious museum on Solovki. Later it was taken to Moscow and stored by the State Historical Museum. In 1991 the Museum handed the cross back to the Russian Church, and it now stands before the iconostasis in the church of Saint Sergius of Radonezh in Krapivnikakh, in the centre of Moscow.

The house of rest on Kiy island is today run by a more thoughtful team, mindful of the treasure they guard. The cathedral has been reconsecrated and a plain carved pine replica of the cross set up. Only the tip of one fresco peeps out from behind its Soviet whitewash. The rest, we fear, is lost forever. The west wall still carries the cinema projectionist’s balcony and projection windows. The superior’s house and some of the monastery’s domestic and cell buildings house holidaymakers in basic two-, three- and four-bedded rooms with no private facilities. Water comes from the well, washing tends to be in the sea or the banya (Russian sauna). The little church of the Source of the Pure Waters, built on top of a large, inscribed, slab cross that marks the spot where the waters were discovered, is in reasonable condition. The bell tower has been capped off and stands truncated, oddly out of scale. Next to it the tombs of the hierarchs are full of rubble and weeds. Visitors and a resident historian do their best to bring history alive. A guide takes tourists round once a day during the summer months. The officially approved method of visiting the island is by making the crossing on Burevestnik, a rusting and evidently unseaworthy boat that plies between Onega port and Kiy, once a day on high tide. Once on the island a day ticket for Rb300 entitles you to three meals plus tea and biscuits in the house of rest’s delightfully Soviet canteen, where meat balls and buckwheat porridge are served up followed by a hint of stewed fruit in a watery grave (compote) for dessert. Tables are numbered and seats allocated.

To turn Kiy back into a working monastery would involve turning out the first and now the oldest house of rest in Russia, still surviving and functioning today while the majority of its colleagues have gone to the wall. In itself, the Kiy house of rest is a national institution worth preserving, being ecologically sensitive and combining history and nature trails with outdoors, sun and sea. In some years it is booked out for the whole season by May. It may take some creative thinking to combine a renewed spiritual vocation with continued tourism, but the template, it seems to me, does exist elsewhere, such as the monasteries in the mountains of Bulgaria which have renovated their guesthouses and now offer holiday accommodation to tourists eager to escape to another dimension in the fresh air and splendid scenery.

Kiy aficionados passing through central Moscow might like to see the original Kiy cross in the Church of St Sergius of Radonezh in Krapivnicheskiy pereulok (open in the mornings) and to marvel at the dark amphibolite used to decorate the interior of the Lubyanka metro station. It was quarried on Kiy island.