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Surprise Russian Orthodox Ceremony
Solovetskiy Islands, White Sea to Norway
Today at Solovetskiy was totally unexpected —and so amazing that it’s hard to describe, but I am going to try. We ran a continuous zodiac shuttle for the passengers back and forth from the ship to the island where a ceremony was being held at the monastery to bless new bells that had been made and shipped over to the island.
The Archbishop of Russia, the second highest authority in the Russian Orthodox church flew out from Moscow for the blessing and to perform the ceremony in the Russian Transfiguration Church in the monastery’s Kremlin. Pilgrims from all over the country came to celebrate and pray, from old women in colorful babushkas (scarves) and skirts, to young people… all arriving en masse to take part in the ceremony. We were the only outside witnesses to this special event, and had to wait most of the morning, but it was really worth it. The pomp and ceremony was spectacular, with all the monks and priests carrying crosses and icons, dressed in long robes with huge hats, parading out of the church as they made their way to the bells. The Archbishop then got up on the bell platform and started flinging water around with large brush, blessing the bells with his holy water. Most of us got blessed as well! When we came back to the ship, everyone was so excited and some of the passengers even said that if they had to turn around and go home now, it was worth coming!
We ended the day with Olga Stone playing a Russian piece of music that was inspired by the ringing of church bells and Sergey did a toast with vodka with all our passengers. What a day… and we have pictures to prove it!
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The trip was great and traveling with Diane was a special treat; never had done that before. I was however disappointed about there not being a slide show at the end of the trip showing all of us travelers. It’s something I told Diane to look forward to. I know there’ll be a book coming, but being together for the show was always such fun. I also missed having a birder leader along. I knew some of the birds (it’s a duck!), but always depended on experts.
Thanks for a special trip to a special part of the world!
We are finishing up a great photolog for this trip. The slide show which was done on some trips in the past was very dependent on how much free time our staff had. To be consistent from trip to trip we will be providing photologs on all ship based trips. It is a nice way to remember the trip and easier to share. We always provide a naturalist on our trips and some are more bird focused than others.
A wonderful note from Lynne. There was a great serendipity between the White Sea trips to which she refers and to the recent Black Sea ones, quite apart from the opposition in their names. At Solovetsky we noted that the Monastery Complex had been used as a place of incarceration for undesirables from the time of Ivan IV (the Terrible). When Catherine the Great was having problems with the Cossacks in the absorption of Ukraine (Little Russia) into Russia in the 1780s she decided to exile the Hetman (Head Man) of the Cossacks, from very near Odessa, where we were, to Solovetsky. The gentleman was in his early 80s (yes, that is not a mistake) at the time and spent 20 years in a tiny cell near the monastery. He was pardoned when he was well over 100 but instead of returning home elected to stay at Solovetsky as a monk. He died at about the age of 115. As he was born in around 1697 and died in about 1812, he skipped an entire century!! Few of us can hope to do that.