INTRODUCTION 1. Resurrections of Valaam This Book Is Not A

INTRODUCTION 1. Resurrections of Valaam The Providence of God had prepared a severe historical fate for Valaam Monastery. Attacks of enemies, fires, and trials of ungodly times fell to the Monastery’s lot, but, by the Mercy of God, old Valaam is going through a rebirth. On 13 December 1989, on the commemoration day of the Holy Apostle Andrew the First Called, and after being abandoned for 50 years, the first monks stepped on the holy ground of Valaam. For centuries Valaam Monastery had been a spiritual and cultural centre of Russia and that is the role it should gain in our time as well.1 This book is not a conventional history book. It deals with the past of the Russian Orthodox monastery of Valaam, but not by way of listing dates and events. Instead, the book is an attempt to analyze and understand numerous aspects and features of the popular image of Valaam’s past. It is better described as a book about the writing of history rather than about history as such. On the other hand, as we shall see, the dif- ference between the two is not so crucial after all. To understand the starting point of this study, one has to first con- sider the current status of Valaam as well as its overall development. The words above, written by the late patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Aleksei II in 2003, offer an apposite introduction to the question by neatly compressing the contemporary perceptions connected to Valaam Monastery into a few sentences. Valaam, located on an island of Lake Ladoga in the area known as Russian Karelia, has been going through a major post-Soviet revival during the last two decades. The ‘rebirth’ of the monastery has coincided with and been bolstered by the rise of the Orthodox Church and neo- patriotic ideas. Ever since its re-establishment in 1989, the borderland 1 The greeting of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Aleksei II for the par- ticipants of the Second International Conference “Valaam monastery: Spiritual Tradi- tions, History, Culture” on September 29–October 1, 2003 (in Valaamskii Monastyr’: dukhovnye traditsii, istoriia, kul’tura, 5). In this study the Russian and Church Slavonic texts have been translated into English despite certain problems concerning the trans- lation of concepts and their meanings. The sources are naturally mentioned for those who want to acquaint themselves with the original texts. The transliteration of Russian words has been made according to the Library of Congress standard. 2 introduction monastery has been considered a part of the spiritual heritage of ‘Holy Russia,’ and it has been repaired and funded accordingly. Since the turn of the twenty-first century the monastery has attracted not just monks, but an ever growing number of visiting pilgrims and tourists from Russia and abroad. However, the history of monastic activities on the island has been a turbulent one with numerous obscurities and unanswered questions. When it comes to the early phases of the monastery, the amount of textual source material has been minimal: mention of medieval or early modern Valaam, preserved up until modern times, has been scarce, sporadic and contradictory. The lack of source material has been considered mostly due to the monastery’s location in the rest- less borderland area, resulting in ransacking, fires and the desertion of the monastic settlement of Valaam. Even the crucial question of pinpointing the date of the monastery’s founding has been a battlefield of numerous speculations and theories. The popular, legendary pos- tulation of its founding has been sometime during the tenth century. Scholars have debated between several other speculations, the most prominent ones being the twelfth century, 1329 and the turn of the fifteenth century. In light of present knowledge, the establishment of the monastic settlement in Valaam seems to have taken place as a part of the ‘monastic colonization’ of the peripheral wilderness areas of the principalities of Moscow and Novgorod during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Numerous monasteries were founded in sparsely populated areas in order to ensure monks the possibility for ascetic endeavours. In many cases—including the founding of Valaam Monastery—the emergence of monasteries was also in accordance with the interests of secular power structures, which aimed to consolidate their grip on the peripheral areas.2 At the end of the sixteenth century, the Ladoga area became a stage for borderland warfare, forcing the monks of Valaam to leave their monastery for good and eventually join other monasteries at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The area stayed under Swed- ish rule for a century, during which Valaam Monastery, in practise, remained nonexistent. Only in the second decade of the eighteenth 2 See, e.g., Crummey, Formation of Muscovy, 120–121. Korpela, World of Ladoga, 27; 154; 194–196..

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