Mikhailo-Arkhangelsky Monastery

The Mikhailo-Arkhangelsky monastery is a dissolved men's community on the edge of Veliky Ustyug, the town's most completely preserved monastic ensemble. By church legend and hagiographic accounts it is the oldest in the whole Russian North: founded in 1212, in the reign of the Rostov prince Konstantin Vsevolodovich, by the monk Kiprian, who chose a place 'by the lakes beyond the fortress scree' and built wooden churches of the Presentation of the Virgin and of Archangel Michael. The community is reliably documented from 1521, when it received a charter of exemption from the grand prince Vasily Ioannovich. In 1651 a severe fire destroyed the wooden buildings — and immediately the first stone ones rose: the Mikhailo-Arkhangelsky cathedral and the Presentation church with its refectory, built in 1653–1656. In 1682 the Vladimir gate church appeared, and in 1710 a small stone church of the Mid-Pentecost replaced the chapel over Kiprian's grave. In the first half of the eighteenth century the ensemble was completed by two-storey superior's (1734–1735) and brethren's (1736–1737) cells; from 1842 the Troitse-Gledensky monastery, and from 1860 the Lalsk monastery, were attached to it. The ensemble has kept its stone-period composition almost whole — a rare case among northern communities, most of which were rebuilt or burned. Today the monastery is quiet: no active services, no museum ticket booths, with access to the grounds and monastic calm. Come here after the Sobornoye dvorishche in the centre — the contrast of town heights and monastic silence is half the impression, and the other half is a walk along the ensemble's edge by the rivers.