The Solovetsky Islands

An archipelago in the White Sea with two histories stacked on the same ground. Two monks from Kirillo-Belozersky founded a monastery here in the second quarter of the fifteenth century and by the 1500s it was one of the wealthiest landowners and most powerful spiritual centres in Russia, a fortress of boulders on a frozen sea. On Bolshoi Zayatsky there is something much older: stone labyrinths, spirals of low rock of a type once common across northern Europe and now almost gone everywhere else, so the best surviving examples are here. Then in 1921 the Soviet state turned the monastery into the first camp of the Gulag, and it ran until 1939. Solzhenitsyn treated Solovki as the place the whole system began. UNESCO listed the islands in 1992. 861 people at the 2010 census, reached by air or by seasonal ferry from Arkhangelsk Oblast.