Sviyazhsk Assumption Monastery
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How it came to be
Sviyazhsk stands where the Volga, the Sviyaga and the Shchuka rivers meet. In 1551 Ivan IV, 'the Terrible', founded a fortress here as the forward base for his conquest of the Kazan Khanate. The fortress was put together in four weeks from parts made in Uglich and floated down the Volga. During the siege of Kazan in 1552 it served as a base for the Russian army.
In 1555, the year the Diocese of Kazan was established, the Assumption Monastery was founded, with the monk German as its first archimandrite. Work on the Assumption Cathedral began in 1556, and its interior was covered with frescoes in the 1560s. The monastery became a centre of Ivan IV's programme to extend Moscow's rule and Orthodoxy along the Volga, and it housed one of the first printing presses in Russia.
After 1918 the monastery was closed and used as a youth prison colony and then as a Gulag camp. A psychiatric hospital occupied the buildings from the 1950s until 1994, and in 1997 the complex was returned to the Orthodox Church and restoration began. Since the Kuybyshev Reservoir was created in 1955 the town has been called an island, though a causeway links it to the mainland. The cathedral and monastery were inscribed in 2017 at the 41st session of the World Heritage Committee in Kraków.
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