Spaso-Sumorin Monastery

The monastery was founded in 1554 by St Feodosy Sumorin: having obtained a charter from Tsar Ivan the Terrible and the blessing of Metropolitan Makary, he raised a wooden tent-roofed church of the Transfiguration with a refectory, with the help of Totma's citizens, on the bank of the little Pesya Denga river. Feodosy died in 1568, and soon after the community gained a second church, the Vvedeniye. Stone construction began in 1685–1689 with a cathedral and Vvedensky chapel that started monumental building in Totma. After the relics of St Feodosy were uncovered in 1796, the cathedral was rebuilt as a heated one in the classical manner, adding a superstructure with a dome; its final look in the spirit of architect Konstantin Thon came with the major rebuilding of 1876–1880 — five domes, a newly built altar and abundant decor stylised to seventeenth-century architecture. The ensemble's Voznesensky cathedral is a story of its own: the stone church of 1757–1764 quickly settled into the weak ground, a new one was built in 1796–1801, and by 1825 a large refectory with chapels and a portico was added. Its architect was Vasily Kazakov — son of the architect Matvei Kazakov; the walls and dome carry heavily damaged 1860s paintings by the academician Platon Tyurin — even in that state they read with grandeur. In 1823 the monastery buried Ivan Kuskov — the Totma navigator, founder of Fort Ross in California and administrator of the Russian colonies in America: the grave turns the community into a point on the map of Russian America. From 1832 the monastery held the Dedovskaya Trinity hermitage on Dedov island of the Sukhona, founded back in 1676 — itself a subject for a walk along the river.