Kerzhensky Sketes — Old Believer forest monasteries of the Nizhny Novgorod Zavolzhye, standing along the Kerzhenets River and in the neighboring Chernoramensky forests of Semyonovsky Uyezd, Nizhny Novgorod Governorate. The first cells appeared here in the early 1660s; the sketes were ravaged twice — under Bishop Pitirim in 1719–1720 and by decree in 1853 — and the last communities were dispersed at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s.[1][2] The Kerzhenets gave its name to an entire movement within Old Belief: "Kerzhentsy" and "kerzhaki" was what Old Believers were called far beyond the Governorate's borders, all the way to the Urals and Siberia.[1][3]

Where They Came From

The forests of Zavolzhye were convenient for precisely the same reasons they were inconvenient for the authorities: their roadlessness, their bogs, and their proximity to the Volga trade route. Sketes were established in the basins of the Volga's left tributaries — along the Kerzhenets, the Uzola, the Linda, the Vezloma, the Vatoma, the Doroguch — and along the Chorny Lukh, a tributary of the Unzha; these lands were then divided among Balakhninsky Uyezd, Nizhegorodsky Uyezd, and Yuryevetsky Uyezd, while Semyonovsky Uyezd was established only in 1779.[1]

One of the first sketes was founded in 1662 by the monk Yefrem (Potyomkin) — "some two hundred versts and more from Nizhny, beyond the Volga River, in great forests amid bogs." In March 1666 he was seized during a search led by Colonel A. N. Lopukhin, and the skete was burned. Skete Smolyany, according to some sources established in 1656 by monks of the Smolensk Bizyukov Monastery — Sergiy Saltykov and the Potyomkin brothers — and according to others in 1657, was headed from 1660 by a monk of that same monastery, Dionisiy Shuysky, who brought a supply of chrism and holy gifts consecrated during the time of Patriarch Iosif.[1][4]

Followers of the monk Kapiton, who had preached between Shuya and Vyazniki, also made their way here: searches conducted in 1664 uncovered several secret settlements of "kapitony" on the Kerzhenets. And after the fall of Solovetsky Monastery in 1676 came the main wave. Tradition names seven Solovetsky monks — Arseny, Nikanor, Onufry, Parfeny, Sofontiy, Trifilly, and Adrian — who built cells in the valley of the Sanokhta River; the place has been called the Valley of the Seven Brothers ever since.[1]

In 1677, Sofontiy established a hermitage dedicated to the Holy Spirit six versts from Semyonov; after his name, an entire branch of the Kerzhenets Old Believer priestist communities was called Sofontiite, and after his successor Onufriy's name — Onufriite. The monk-schema-monk Arseniy founded Sharpansky Skit in the Chernoramensky forests near the починок (small settlement) of Larionovo.[2][1]

How many there were

The count of skits diverges, and the divergence is fundamental. The number 77 is a literary figure: it was given by Pavel Melnikov-Pechersky in his "Essays on the Priestist Schism," where he wrote that the skits housed "more than seven hundred monks and upward of 1,800 nuns." Archival tallies yield more: by the early eighteenth century, 94 Old Believer skits were counted in Zavolzhye.[5][1]

The census of 1719–1720 recorded 3,591 cell-dwelling residents, and the breakdown reveals how varied this community was: 1,500 priestless Old Believers, 1,275 Sofontiites, 607 Onufriites, and 209 Dyakonovites.[1]

The skits were not monasteries in the conventional sense: they were individual "communities" — households with cells, a chapel, and their own rule, united under a common place name. In the Komarovsky Skit alone, Komarovsky Skit had 35 such communities at the start of the nineteenth century.[2][6]

How the count changed across inventories and reports:

  • early 18th century — 94 sketes;[1]
  • 1719–1720 — 3,591 cell-dwelling inhabitants;[1]
  • 1743 — over 50 sketes, 791 people;[1]
  • 1788 — 54 sketes, approximately eight thousand inhabitants;[1]
  • 1826 — 28 sketes, 2,839 inhabitants, 75 chapels and prayer houses;[1]
  • 1853 — 16 sketes, 976 inhabitants;[1]
  • 1854 — eight cell-dwelling settlements.[1]

How they lived

The skete land yielded no grain, and the communities sustained themselves through donations from fellow believers and their own labor: they "beat wool," gathered and sold berries and mushrooms to neighboring peasants in summer, using the proceeds to buy bread; in winter the men wove bast shoes and the women spun.[1]

A particular source of income was the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka: the "orphans" living near the sketes — settlers with their own households who did not belong to the community — would collect donations for the monastery from Old Believer merchants on fair days.[6]

Agreements and disputes

The Kerzhenets was not a single society but a network of communities that disputed among themselves and convened councils: in 1703 delegates from Siberian lands gathered for a council of the popovtsy (priest-accepting Old Believers); in 1708–1710 several councils debated how to receive priests who transferred from the official church; in 1717 a reconciliatory assembly was held, and in 1719 the disputes resumed.[1]

It was here, too, that the various *soglasiya* (Old Believer congregations) were born that subsequently spread throughout the Volga Region. The Arsenyevtsy trace their origins to the Kerzhenets *soglasiye* from 1677. In the middle Volga Region toward the end of the 17th century the Spasovo *soglasiye* took shape — also known as the Netovshchina; the sources name the Kerzhenets residents Kuzma Andreyev and Kuzma Panfilov as its founders.[3]

The second Bespopovshchina, known under the name of Kozma and called the Kuzminshchina, also the Netovshchina

— Vasily Frolov, a critic of the Old Believers, 1737[3]

Devastation under Pitirim

Pitirim, consecrated Bishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Alatyr on 23 March 1719, himself came from an Old Believer background: he had lived at Vetka, taken monastic vows there, and by his own admission in the *Prashchitsa* "before my conversion to the holy church I was a ustav-reader." He had been conducting his mission on the Kerzhenets since 1705, and in 1707 he founded the Kerzhebelmash Uspensky Monastery on the site of one of the sketes.[7]

He began with theological disputation: in 1716 he sent Deacon Alexander, the leader of the Trans-Volga Old Believers, 130 questions on matters of faith and received 240 of his own in reply. The "Deacon's Answers" were submitted in May 1719; the disputation took place in October of that year in the selo of Pafnutovo, and the Old Believers, under threat of arrest, acknowledged their errors. The Synod published Pitirim's answers in 1721 under the title *Prashchitsa dukhovnaya*.[7][8]

On 18 February 1720, Deacon Alexander submitted a petition to Peter I in which he described what had actually happened: the bishop had arrived at the disputation "with many soldiers" and ordered the Old Believers not to argue with him about anything. The deacon was arrested; by a personal imperial decree of 22 February he was sentenced to torture and execution, and on 21 March 1720 he was publicly executed in Nizhny Novgorod.[7][8]

The sketes dispersed — to Vetka and Starodubье, to the North, to the Urals, and to Siberia; from there, from the Kerzhenets root, the Siberian Chasovennoe *soglasiye* later grew. By 1737, in the Kerzhenets and Chernoramen forests, there survived, according to some sources, the poor remnants of two sketes — Olenevsky and Sharpansky — and according to others, just one partially surviving Sharpan.[1][9] For more on this campaign, see the article Pitirimovo Razorenie.

Revival and the Decree of 1853

The sketes were rebuilt anew. As early as 1743, Bishop Dmitry (Sechenov) counted more than 50 sketes with 791 inhabitants in those same forests; by 1788 there were 54, with around eight thousand inhabitants; and by 1826, 28 sketes remained with 2,839 inhabitants — 2,320 Popovtsy, 337 Spasovtsy, and 182 Pomortsы.[1]

Under Nicholas I, the construction and repair of prayer houses was forbidden, as was the registration of new members at the sketes; from 1838 onward, sketes were referred to as villages in official documents. In 1836, the Pokrovsky Edinoverie convent was opened near Semyonov, where female skete dwellers could transfer.[1]

Supervision of the sketes was entrusted by the governor to special-assignment officials, and from 1847 — or from 1846, according to the regional library — this duty fell to Pavel Ivanovich Melnikov. In 1848 he sealed the Kerzhensky Blagoveshchensky skete and persuaded its founder, the monk Tarasiy, to convert to Edinoverie; in 1849 the skete became an Edinoverie monastery, and Tarasiy its first abbot. That same year the Osinovsky women's skete also converted to Edinoverie. In 1852–1853 Melnikov conducted a statistical expedition on the Schism, and in 1854 compiled a "Report on the Current State of the Schism in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate."[1][10][11]

The dates of the dissolution vary across sources: some cite an order of Nicholas I dated 1 March 1853, others a supreme decree of 1 May, and still others date it simply to the spring of 1853. The sketes were closed, and their residents were registered as state peasants of the Khvostikovskaya and Khokhlomskoye volosts of Semyonovsky Uyezd. Venerated icons were removed from the communities: the Kazan image of the Mother of God from Stary Sharpan was taken to the Kerzhensky Blagoveshchensky Edinoverie monastery, and the image of St. Nicholas from Olenevsky skete was taken to the Osinovsky. Old Believers of Semyonovsky Uyezd maintained that the original Sharpan icon had remained with them and that what was taken away was a copy.[1][9][11]

The decree took years to carry out. In 1855, forty people from the Komarovsky skete and up to a hundred from the Olenevsky were designated for resettlement to Ulanger; in 1854, eight cell settlements still remained on the Kerzhenets, and the Ulangersky skete itself was finally destroyed on 28 February 1858, its prayer house converted into a dwelling izba (traditional wooden house).[1][12][6]

The Last Communities

At the turn of the twentieth century, four small women's sketes were still active: the Chernukhinskiy, Olenevskiy, and Komarovskiy in the Kerzhenets forests, and the Ulangersky in the Chornoramenskoye woodlands.[1] Novy Sharpan, established in the 1860s near the old cemetery, was closed in 1928 under its last abbess, Mother Meropia; the Komarovskiy was dissolved around 1927, and its last abbess, Mother Manefa, died in 1934.[13][6]

Not a single Kerzhenets skete has survived. Old Believer cemeteries remain at the sites of the former hermitages.[14]

Places of Memory

The skete graves became local shrines, and prayers at them never ceased. The tomb of the nun-schemamonk Fotiniya, one of the "founding elders" of the early eighteenth century, buried between the Komarovskiy and Ulangersky sketes, drew pilgrims on Easter and on June 29; in Smolnyany — on June 26, the feast of the Tikhvin Icon; at the skete of the "Seven Maidens" near Larionovo — on May 30; at Novy Sharpan — on Easter and on the feast of the Kazan Icon.[15][4][16][13]

In Stary Sharpan, the tomb of the schemamonk Praskovya is venerated. Old Believers revere her as Tsarevna Sofya Alekseyevna, who allegedly fled to the skete from a Moscow convent accompanied by twelve streltsy, and call the burial site the "tsarina's grave." There is no documentary evidence for this, and the same legend is told of Fotinya as well — the story splits in two yet has lived on in skete memory for three centuries.[9][15]

In 1995, by a resolution of the Legislative Assembly of Nizhny Novgorod Region, the village of Bolshoye Olenevo was declared a historic settlement, while the Komarovskiy skete, Smolnyany, Stary and Novy Sharpan, and the "Holy Well with the graves of the burned" near the village of Osinki were designated places of cultural significance; the graves of Sofontiy, Trifilliy, Iosif, Nikodim, Daniil, and the schemamonks Agafiya, Praskovya, and Fekla were recognized as historical monuments.[1]

In Literature

Literary fame came to the Kerzhenets through the very man who had closed it down: the two-novel cycle by Melnikov-Pechersky, In the Forests and On the Hills, was written from material gathered in the course of official duties. The Komarovskiy skete became its principal setting, and the abbess of the Olenevo Anfisina hermitage, Mother Margarita, served as the prototype for Mother Manefa.[17][12]

Sources

  1. pravenc.ru — Orthodox Encyclopedia — Kerzhenets (archive)
  2. radilov.ru — Volzhsky Perekriostok — Yashina A. S. The First Kerzhenets Old Believer Hermitages // The Gorodetsky Region in the Notes of Local Historians. Issue 6
  3. ruvera.ru — Russkaya Vera — Old Believer Sects and Congregations in the Territory of the Nizhny Novgorod Region (archive)
  4. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Smolnyany Hermitage
  5. Melnikov P. I. (Andrey Pechersky). Sketches of the Popovshchina — Chapter III: "There were 77 hermitages and in them more than seven hundred monks and over 1,800 nuns"
  6. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Komarovsky Hermitage
  7. pravenc.ru — Orthodox Encyclopedia — Pitirim, Archbishop of Nizhny Novgorod and Alatyr (archive)
  8. ruvera.ru — Russkaya Vera — 300 Years of the "Dyakonovy Otvety" (archive)
  9. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Stary (Pustoy) Sharpan
  10. ngounb.ru — Nizhny Novgorod State Regional Universal Scientific Library — Melnikov Pavel Ivanovich (Andrey Pechersky): Literary Map (archive)
  11. booksite.ru — Vologda Regional Library — Kerzhenets Hermitages // Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary
  12. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Olenevsky Hermitage
  13. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Novy Sharpan
  14. керженец.рф — Old Believer Hermitages in the Kerzhenets River Region (archive)
  15. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Grave of the Nun-Schemamonk Fotinia
  16. irisk.me — Institute of Manuscript and Early Printed Books — Hermitage of the "Seven Maidens"
  17. cyberleninka.ru — CyberLeninka — The Locus of "Komarovsky Hermitage" in P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky's Dilogy "In the Forests" and "On the Hills" (archive)