Pechenga Monastery

This monastery Pechenga ( Russian Печенгский монастырь ) is a Russian Orthodox monastery at the mouth of the River Pechenga in the Barents Sea , or about 135 km west of the present-day city of Murmansk . It was founded in 1533 by the Novgorod monk Tryfon von Pecheng and for a long time was the northernmost monastery in the world. It has been rebuilt since 1997.

history

1533-1764

Trifon set itself the task of converting the Sami to Christianity based on the model of the Solovetsky monastery . The monastery grew rapidly and in 1572 already had around 50 monks and 200 lay brothers. In 1583, six years after Trifon's death, the monastery was looted and burned by the Swedes . According to contemporary reports, 51 monks and 65 lay people died in this attack.

In 1591 Tsar Fyodor I gave the order to re-establish the monastery near the town of Kola , but in 1619 this new monastery was also destroyed by flames. Ultimately, it was relocated to the city itself. Since there were hardly any novices left, the Holy Synod finally decided to dissolve it in 1764.

1886-1944

In the course of the intensive colonization and Russification of the Kola Peninsula in the late 19th century, it was again founded. In 1886 the monastery was rebuilt at its original location on the Barents Sea. Since then it has consisted of two houses, the “Upper Monastery”, which was dedicated to the monastery founder Trifon and the 116 martyrs of the attack by Sweden in 1589, and the “Lower Monastery” on the seashore.

In 1920 the Petschenga area and thus also the monastery were added to Finland, which had become independent in 1917 , and continued to flourish during this time. At the end of the Continuation War in 1944, the monks fled the advance of the Red Army into the interior of Finland, the monastery buildings were destroyed in the war.

Pechenga fell to the Soviet Union, and so the monks of the monastery closed the 1940 established new valamo ( "New Valamo") in Finland Heinävesi of which 1,940 of the refugees monks from the on an island in Lake Ladoga located Valaam Monastery (finn . Valamo ) was founded. Until 1984, when the last monk died at the age of 100, the Pechenga monks formed an autonomous brotherhood within the Uusi-Valamo monastery.