Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius

• 1. Introduction

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  In May 1923, peasants and soldiers filled the halls of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius to hear something new. A band from the Moscow cavalry played Stenka Razin over the radio. A lecturer followed, explaining the benefits of chemical manure and machine ploughs. A gypsy song came next, and the evening closed with a talk about the wonders of radio technology. Charles Ashleigh, who reported on the event, described a crowd that mixed townspeople with soldiers and peasants.

  Those halls had housed the most important monastery in Russia for nearly six hundred years. Three years before that demonstration, the Soviet government had closed the lavra and distributed its buildings among civic institutions and museums. Part of the complex was now a training site for electrical engineers who specialized in radio.

  The monastery stood in Sergiyev Posad, about 70 km northeast of Moscow, on ground that began as dense forest. How it grew from a wooden church into a walled complex of cathedrals is the first question. How it survived foreign sieges and a Soviet closure is the second. Both questions begin on a wooded hill called Makovets, in the year 1337.

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• 2. The Founder's Charter

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  In 1355, Sergius of Radonezh issued a charter requiring the monastic community to construct auxiliary buildings: a refectory, a kitchen, and a bakery. That document carried unusual weight. His followers used it as a template when founding their own communities, and more than 400 monasteries grew from that model across Russia. Among them were the celebrated Solovetsky, Kirillov, and Simonov monasteries.

  When Dmitri Donskoi prepared to confront the Tatars at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, Sergius gave his support. He sent two monks, Peresvet and Oslyabya, to fight alongside the Russian forces. At the opening of the battle, Peresvet was killed in single combat against a Tatar bogatyr.

  A Tatar raiding party burned the monastery to the ground in 1408. The community rebuilt, and 1422 brought something the monastery had never known in its eighty-five-year history: stone.

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• 3. Sacred Stones

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  In 1422, Serbian monks who had found refuge at the monastery after the Battle of Kosovo built the first stone cathedral on the site. Sergius was declared patron saint of the Russian state that same year. His relics were placed in the new cathedral, and they remain visible there today.

  Andrei Rublev and Daniil Chyorny, the most celebrated icon painters of medieval Russia, were summoned to decorate the cathedral with frescoes. For generations afterward, Muscovite royals came here to be baptized and to hold thanksgiving services.

  In 1476, Ivan III brought Pskovian masters to build the Church of the Holy Spirit. The structure became one of the few surviving Russian churches crowned with a belltower. Its interior holds the earliest known specimens of glazed tiles used for decoration. In the early 16th century, Vasily III added the Nikon annex and the Serapion tent. The Serapion tent served as a burial chamber for several of Sergius's disciples.

  Ivan the Terrible commissioned the Assumption Cathedral in 1559, and it took 26 years to complete. The six-pillared structure was built larger than its namesake in the Moscow Kremlin. Its iconostasis includes Simon Ushakov's masterpiece, the icon of the Last Supper. In 1684, masters from Yaroslavl painted the interior walls in violet and blue.

  By the 16th century, the monastery had grown into one of Russia's wealthiest landowners. A posad had formed near its walls and developed into the town of Sergiyev Posad. The vault of the Assumption Cathedral holds the remains of Boris Godunov, his family, and several patriarchs of the 20th century.

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• 4. Fortress and Refuge

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  In the 1550s, the wooden palisade encircling the monastery was torn down and replaced with stone walls stretching 1.5 km, featuring twelve towers. Those walls were put to a severe test in 1608, when a Polish-Lithuanian army began a siege that lasted sixteen months.

  In 1618, Wladyslaw IV launched a second assault. That attack failed, but a shell-hole it left in the cathedral gates has since been preserved as a memorial.

  Peter I, still young, twice found shelter at the monastery while fleeing political enemies. His stays brought lasting patronage. A small baroque palace for the patriarchs, noted for its luxurious interiors, was added to the grounds. A royal palace, its facades painted in a checkerboard design, joined the complex. The refectory of St. Sergius, also finished in dazzling checkerboard, covered 510 square meters. At the time, it was the largest hall in Russia. The Church of John the Baptist's Nativity, commissioned by the Stroganovs between 1693 and 1699, was built over one of the monastery's gates.

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• 5. Imperial Devotion

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  In 1744, Empress Elizabeth conferred on the monastery the dignity of a Lavra. From that point, the Metropolitan of Moscow also held the position of Archimandrite of the Lavra. Elizabeth's attachment to the monastery was personal as well as institutional. She walked on foot from Moscow to the monastery every year. Her secret spouse, Alexey Razumovsky, accompanied her on these journeys. Razumovsky commissioned a baroque church dedicated to the Virgin of Smolensk, the last major shrine to be built at the Lavra.

  Elizabeth also commissioned a white-and-blue baroque belltower. Its architects, Ivan Michurin and Dmitry Ukhtomsky, brought it to a height of 88 meters. At that height, it was among the tallest structures built in Russia up to that point.

  A seminary founded in 1742 was elevated to an ecclesiastical academy in 1814. Throughout the 19th century, the Lavra remained the wealthiest monastery in Russia. The monastery maintained an extensive collection of manuscripts and books, and the medieval collections of its sacristy attracted thousands of visitors each year. Two conservative philosophers, Konstantin Leontiev and Vasily Rozanov, were buried in a skete the monastery maintained in Sergiyev Posad.

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• 6. Silence and Return

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  In 1930, the monastery's bells were destroyed, among them the Tsar-Bell, which weighed 65 tons. Pavel Florensky and his followers worked to prevent Soviet authorities from seizing and selling the sacristy's collection. Their efforts preserved part of the holdings, but many valuables were lost or transferred elsewhere.

  In 1945, Joseph Stalin's temporary accommodation with the Russian Orthodox Church led to the Lavra's return. On the 16th of April 1946, divine services resumed at the Assumption Cathedral. The monastery served as the seat of the Moscow Patriarchate until 1983, when the patriarch was permitted to move to the Danilov Monastery in Moscow.

  Significant restoration work was carried out in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1993, the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius was inscribed on the UN World Heritage List. The monastery has since maintained a presence at remote outposts, including a Trinity Church on King George Island in the Antarctic.

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