Passage Gate Tower of Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery

The monastery’s only surviving building.

Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery, standing on the White Sea coast, at the Northern Dvina River mouth, was first mentioned in a chronicle in 1419. Before the foundation of Arkhangelsk it served as Russia’s main sea port. It was here that a maritime expedition headed by Richard Chancellor landed in the XVI century making a start for the sea trade between Russia and England. And in 1731, Mikhail Lomonosov, a famous scientist in the future, set from Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery to Moscow to study.

In the second half of the XVII century, stone churches appeared at the monastery. They were surrounded with a wooden wall that had four-cornered towers. The east gate, the main entrance to the monastery, was topped with an octahedral tent-roof tower. It was this passage tower that scientists managed to save when the monastery was closed and turned into a large shipbuilding enterprise.

In 1933, the tower was transported to Kolomenskoe (the permission for it had been received in the White Sea-Onega scientific expedition in 1931). For a long time, it stood in the Ascension Garden, not far from the Church of the Ascension, and was removed to its present site only in 2007.

The tower has been much favored by film-makers. You could have seen it in such Russian pictures as Andrey Rublev (1966), Shadows Disappear at Noon (1971), Ruslan and Liudmila (1971), and Russia Young (1982).