Travel Lodeynoye Pole - Lahdenpohja

The main attraction of this hike is the Valaam Monastery.

The founders of monasticism on Fr. Valaam is considered to be Saints Sergius and Herman of Valaam. The earliest documentary evidence of the monastery dates back to the 14th century. The Valaam Monastery reached its greatest prosperity in the 19th century. under Abbot Damascus.

After 1917, the Valaam Monastery found itself on the territory that was ceded to Finland. In March 1940, after the Soviet-Finnish war, Fr. Valaam went to the USSR. At the same time, the Valaam Monastery was closed; some of the inhabitants moved to Finland, where they founded the Novovalamsk monastery, which still exists today. Since 1940, the monastery housed first a school for young men, then a state farm, and in 1952–84 a boarding school for war invalids and the elderly. As a result of economic use, many monuments on the territory of the monastery were destroyed, all hermitages were ruined, wooden churches and chapels were destroyed.

In 1979 about. Valaam was given the status of a historical, architectural and natural museum-reserve, restoration of individual monuments began. In September 1989, the official opening of the monastery took place, and the revival of monastic life on Valaam began. In 1999 on the territory of about. Valaam created the natural park "Valaam Archipelago".

Outside the main architectural ensemble there are sketes (Svyatoostrovsky, with the wooden church of Alexander Svirsky, 1855; Avraamievsky, Sergievsky, Germanovsky, Konevsky, Tikhvinsky, etc.), chapels, and worship crosses. In the late 19th - early 20th centuries. structures arose reminiscent of the shrines of Jerusalem: a marble chapel with the likeness of the Holy Sepulcher in the Church of the Resurrection of the Lord (1901–1906, architect V. I. Barankeev) of the Resurrection Skete, the Assumption Church. The Gethsemane Skete and others. The wooden church of the Smolensk Icon of the Mother of God (1915–17) of the Smolensk Skete was built in the "ancient Novgorod" style according to the design of Grand Duke Peter Nikolaevich in memory of the Russian soldiers who fell in World War I.