Iversky Monastery Valday

Patriarch Nikon founded Iversky in 1653 on an island in Lake Valday, modelling it on the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos and bringing a copy of the Iveron icon from there - part of the same programme of Greek-oriented reform that produced New Jerusalem near Moscow and that split the Russian church. The monastery got a printing press, one of the earliest outside Moscow, and grew wealthy. The Assumption cathedral of 1656 is the main building, five-domed and heavy, with later ranges, walls and towers around it, all on a low wooded island reached by a causeway through pine forest - the setting is much of the point, since the buildings sit surrounded by water and trees with no town around them. It was closed in 1927 and used variously as a museum, a workshop, a hospital and a tourist base, returning to the church in 1991 with a long restoration since.

History

Nikon, elected Patriarch in 1652, asked the tsar in 1653 for leave to found a monastery at Valday, and by that autumn two wooden churches were in use; in 1655 all the monks of the Kutein Monastery at Orsha moved here. It ran the second printing house in Russia after the Moscow Print Yard and the first tile works in the country, its first stone church was finished in 1656, and after a long decline it was reopened in 1991 (Wikipedia, Valday Iversky Monastery).

Highlights

• The island - a monastery surrounded by lake and pine with no settlement around it.
• The 1656 cathedral - the five-domed Assumption at the centre.
• The Athos model - a foundation deliberately copying Iviron, part of Nikon's reforms.
• The causeway - the approach through pine forest from the mainland.

When to go

May to September. Two hours. Combines with Valday town and the national park around the lakes.

Practical notes

An active monastery with dress rules and areas closed to visitors. Photography is restricted. Restoration continues in places. There is little interpretation on site for visitors.

Nearby

Valday town and the bell museum are east; the national park surrounds the lakes.

Key facts