Located in the White Sea in northwestern Russia, the Solovetsky Islands once housed one of Russia’s first gulags, but now its centuries-old monastery and the seascape’s stark beauty attracts thousands of tourists and the spiritually inclined.
Barely 100 miles from the arctic circle, The Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea breathes history, mixing the secular and the spiritual. At one time, there was a prison here, no less grim than France’s Bastille, the United States’ Alcatraz, and Poland’s Auschwitz. Since the 15th century, the local monastery has held top-notch political criminals. In those days, there were no special prison facilities; the convicted were locked up in the towers or cellars of impregnable fortresses, and the Solovetsky Monastery was one such fortress. Its massive granite walls were too tough for the Swedes, Danes, and even the powerful British fleet that besieged the monastery during the Crimean War in 1854.
The Solovetsky Monastery was an outpost for the colonisation of northern Russia. It existed almost autonomously –– the monastery was rich and influential, and had its own schools, factories, army, and navy, and its library was one of the most valuable in the Tsarist Russia. But during the socialist revolution of 1917, the monastery was looted and devastated. In the 1920s, the Solovki Special Purpose Camp (SLON) was founded here, the first in a network of concentration camps that from then on encircled all of Russia. Later, the Second World War began and Solovetsky’s street children began to train as sailors for the Northern Fleet.
Once A Prison, Now A Spiritual And Tourist Hub
By Grigory Kubatian; Russia Beyond The Headlines; January 22 2012