Raifa Monastery

Raifa was founded in the 1610s by a hermit on the shore of a forest lake, took its name from a monastery in Sinai, and was rebuilt in stone through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: walls and towers, a Georgian icon church, a large neo-Byzantine Trinity cathedral of 1910, and a bell tower that is the tallest thing for some distance. It sits inside the Volzhsko-Kamsky nature reserve, in pine and mixed forest on the water, which is most of why people come - the setting rather than the buildings. A local tradition holds that the frogs in the lake do not croak, having been silenced at the monks' request, and it is repeated often enough that visitors test it. The monastery was closed in 1928, used as a colony for juvenile offenders, and returned to the church in 1991.

What you actually see

• The lake setting - buildings on the shore of a forest lake inside a nature reserve.
• The 1910 cathedral - a large neo-Byzantine Trinity church with a tall bell tower.
• The frog legend - the local claim that the lake's frogs stay silent.
• The Soviet use - a juvenile colony on the site from 1928 until 1991.

When to go

May to September. Two hours, half a day with the reserve. Popular on summer weekends from Kazan.

Honest expectations

An active monastery with dress rules and closed areas. Weekends bring heavy coach traffic from Kazan and the grounds feel crowded. The buildings are mostly nineteenth and twentieth century, not medieval. The frogs, in fact, croak.

Nearby

The Volzhsko-Kamsky reserve surrounds it; Kazan is half an hour east.