1Valaam, an archipelago in Lake Ladoga near the Finnish-Russian border, is home to one of Russia’s most famous Orthodox shrines, the Transfiguration monastery. Having become by the end of the nineteenth century an important geopolitical center of the Russian Empire on the north-western frontier (Parppei, 2011), today Valaam is one of the most popular destinations for religious and secular pilgrims and travelers, as well as a conventional stage for informal political negotiations. The patriarch and the president have residences on Valaam, and meetings of high-ranking officials and businessmen take place there quite regularly. In this paper, I discuss Valaam as a historical palimpsest, with a diversity of actors, conflicting powers, and blurred boundaries between the secular and the religious, and turn to an analysis of the space as a site of memory, sustained in the memories of those who lived there in the late Soviet era.
2Part of Finland from 1917 to 1940, the archipelago was ceded to the USSR after the Winter War (1939–1940) and remained entirely secular until the early 1990s. The Invalids’ Home (dom invalidov) (Dale, 2013), which served as the main institution on the island, gave way to the Historical and Nature Reserve in the late 1970s. With the onset of perestroika and the liberalization of church life in the USSR at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, the Transfiguration monastery was allowed to return to the island, gradually replacing all secular institutions.
3My first visit to the island was in 2016, although I have been doing fieldwork not far from Valaam—in the mainland part of the Ladoga region—since 2012, exploring the ways in which today’s inhabitants of what was once Finnish Karelia have come to terms with the local past. In my research, Valaam kept slipping away. People didn’t talk about it and seemed never to have been there. I had the feeling that the archipelago was not separated from the mainland by 20 km of Ladoga water, but by thick walls that made it an isolated, inaccessible space. Unlike the locals, the federal and regional media often talked about Valaam, referring to the Russian Orthodox Church’s scandalous policy of developing the island by evicting the local population, establishing profitable businesses on the archipelago and destroying cultural heritage. A celebrated Orthodox pilgrimage site and the target of huge federal investment, Valaam has been the subject of much media attention.
4It was as if Valaam existed in different realities that never intersected: as an isolated and uninteresting territory for the inhabitants of local Ladoga neighborhoods, as the rich household of the present Orthodox monastery, and as a lost home for those who had to leave it after the monastery’s revival. In this article, I ask how these different realities coexist, intersect, and are negotiated. By introducing the notion of “phantom memory space,” I address the issue of “sharing,” widely discussed in relation to sacred sites, and extend it to the field of memory, which, along with the geographical landscape, is a subject of competition and significant boundary work. This article contributes to the debate on the expansion of religious landscapes into hitherto secular territories, sites, and identities, and offers a more sensitive approach to analyzing the development and consequences of these processes.
5I begin by situating my approach within a broader range of studies related to “sharing,” “commonality,” “co-existence,” and “co-action.” After setting the scene and discussing my methods, I turn to the biographies of the former residents of Valaam, discussing their social position and role in relation to the locality and social relations enacted within it. In the next section, I discuss the religious-secular boundary as both an interpretive tool and a mechanism of social distinction. In the final section, I address Valaam’s phantom space as a powerful site of memory for the former local intelligentsia, who have carefully preserved it until today.
6Sharing, contesting, and co-acting as related to particular spaces and localities have become useful analytical tools in different fields. In the anthropology of religion, a powerful impetus for the study of shared shrines came from Robert M. Hayden’s article “Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans” (Hayden, 2002). The study, which provoked both intense criticism (Albera and Couroucli, 2012; Bowman, 2012) and wide support (Hayden et al., 2016), resulted in a flurry of research aimed at either challenging or developing the “antagonistic” approach. Hayden claimed that the coexistence of different religious groups in the same sacred place is always associated with a degree of antagonism, either passive or active, with violence being its most extreme form. The rivalry between different groups for the right to be present in a sacred place is always associated, according to Hayden, with a struggle for domination and the establishment of political hegemony. The anti-religious policy of the Soviet Union in this paradigm is interpreted quite straightforwardly—as a form of “desanctification” and appropriation of the sacra by the state. In turn, the history of post-Soviet postsecularism appears as a history of ecclesiastical revanchism—the takeover of sacred space by the Orthodox Church, which acted as a direct agent of the new Russian state (Hayden et al., 2016: 146).
7The oversimplification and politicization evident in Hayden’s approach has been repeatedly criticized, with his tendency to simplistically define the religious and the secular, to essentialize boundaries, and to reduce the complex picture of interaction in sacred places to a trivial power struggle between groups that are usually too difficult to identify.
8The body of research that has emerged in response to Hayden’s statements is wide ranging, but most of the work deals in one way or another with religious co-participation, syncretism, or conflict in relation to different objects incorporated into diverse religious systems, institutions, and practices. Sharing is treated through the problem of sharing sacra, which Glenn Bowman defines using the term in its Latin meaning as “all transactions related to worshipping the gods, in particular prayers and sacrifices” and that “relates to a range of sites and activities, including ancestral altars, holy places (shrines, synagogues, churches, and mosques), funerals, religious processions, and festivals (even those which ‘secularize’ the sacred)” (Bowman, 2012: 8).
9In their anthropological study of cathedrals, Simon Coleman and Marion Bowman approached cathedrals as shared sacred places while extending their theoretical claims to broader forms of co-habitation (Coleman and Bowman, 2019). Drawing on a discussion in Judith Muskett (Muskett, 2016), they used the idiom of “sacred space and common ground” to describe a situation of intersectionality “not only among different religious ideologies, but also between what are conventionally seen as sacred and secular domains in Euro-American contexts, and often beyond” (Coleman and Bowman, 2019: 3).
10Secular/religious co-existence is also interpreted in terms of “secular sacred,” which, according to Markus Balkenhol et al., encompasses:
a person, object, image, representation or place in which secular and sacred ideas, feelings, emotions, motivations, experiences, perceptions, intertwine, conflate and conflict. We take the secular sacred to denote the intertwining processes of secularization and sacralization. This entanglement works both ways: sacred objects can take on new functions in secular imaginations, gazes and practices, thereby potentially losing or at least transforming their sacredness in the process. Inversely, secular practices and values can take on well-nigh sacred dimensions as they become the subject of worship or interdiction. (Balkenhol et al., 2020: 5)
11Jeanne Kormina and Sergey Shtyrkov used this term in relation to the late Soviet cultural heritage, which became a place for the co-habitation of religious and secular publics in the post-Soviet era (Kormina, 2021; Kormina and Shtyrkov, 2015). Although the notion of “secular sacred” denotes some forms of sharing and conquering, it highlights a wide variety of interactions that resist being interpreted in either the “secular” or “sacred” categories constituting this new oxymoronic term.
12In parallel, co-participation and interaction have been actively debated in other areas. Laurent Thévenot’s concept of “common places” (Thévenot, 2015) and Elinor Ostrom’s category of “urban commons” (Ostrom, 1990) address sharing and competition between various actors for something considered to be common. Both approaches have produced a rich harvest and a thicket of research literature, the branches of which barely overlap. Studies that rely on Thévenot’s sociology center on the idea of common good and collective action, the ways different people find (or don’t find) common language to behave collectively despite all the differences and divergences of opinion (Thévenot, 2015). Ostrom’s conception is grounded on the idea of common urban space belonging to no one and therefore belonging to all. Communality is also discussed in other cultural theories of collective action, related primarily to the problem of political agency and arenas where people “do politics” (Zhelnina, 2020: 20-22).
13Inspired by these diverse approaches to “sharing” as co-presence, co-existence, and co-participation, my research addresses the issue of “sharing” in relation to memory, focusing on how not only the contemporary landscape of a sacred site is shared, but also its past. I use Valaam as an example of a “phantom memory space,” a landscape that its former inhabitants are unable to share with its new owners in reality, but continue to share in their memories. Once an important site of memory and social imagery for the late Soviet intelligentsia, in the post-Soviet period it has become a powerful symbol of secular-religious conflicts, most well-known for the cases of Solovki and Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg (Burgess, 2007; Bogumił et al., 2015; Shtorn and Buteyko, 2016; Voronina and Bogumił, 2018; Kormina, 2021; Kraikovski and Lajus, 2021; Dianina, 2021). But, as I will show below, the phantom pain of the lost archipelago is not grounded in a sacred-secular divide, but rather in a deep sense of loss and uprooting from a place closely tied to the status, authority, and social identity of its inhabitants. In the memories of its displaced inhabitants, Valaam appears as a shared site of coexistence, which it can no longer be in everyday life today. Drawing on their biographical narratives, I consider the local landscape as an important site of their imaginary, evoking the phantom pain of an unshared home.
14In 2016, I arrived at Valaam with a group of tourists gathered in Sortavala, from where regular ferries leave for the archipelago during the summer season. The guide met our group at the pier and led us for several hours along the paths of Valaam, ending the tour at the Transfiguration cathedral. During the few hours of walking, I saw well-kept grounds, beautifully restored chapels and hermitages scattered through the forests of Valaam, clean level paths, and almost no people except for other groups of tourists walking around the island with their guides. Three years later, I was on the island again, but came as a “wild tourist,” independent of the sight and schedule of any guide (Melnikova, 2021). This time the landscape of Valaam struck me even more—with its wildness, splendor, and desolation.
Figure 1. General view of Monastery Bay and Transfiguration Cathedral on Valaam.
Credit: Ekaterina Melnikova
15The territory of the Valaam archipelago on which the Transfiguration monastery is situated today is 36 km2, containing the central manor house with the main cathedral and other buildings, thirteen hermitages and twenty-one chapels located all over the archipelago, and an extensive infrastructure related to the economy of the monastic complex: a bakery, cowshed, and dairy farm, a fishery, several gardens, stables, workshops, a freight and passenger fleet, hotels, refectories, and cafes. Several secular organizations have also survived on the islands, but their activities are now co-opted into the work of the monastery. The military unit, still stationed on the archipelago, hosts young recruits from the Valaam monastery. Fire and Rescue Unit no. 39 of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations is officially responsible for “the protection of the Religious Organization ‘Transfiguration Valaam Stavropegial Monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate).’” The museum-reserve that once existed on the island has been transformed into the monastery museum in the Vladimirskiy hermitage.
16The brotherhood of the monastery is about 200 people, but the number is flexible and heavily depends on a constant rotation of novices and monks. In the summer season, when shipping begins, the population of the island increases—volunteers come to work in the monastery, pilgrimage staff arrive to serve the tourists, and the tourists themselves make up around 200,000 visitors a year. But even in summer the archipelago looks deserted: tourists come for only a few hours mostly without overnight stays and move around the island as part of tourist and pilgrimage groups along strictly defined routes. Most people can be found at the central manor, where the main pilgrim hotels are located, and at the nearby tent camp, where summer youth groups usually stay. Remote parts of the island are difficult to access and hidden from view.
- 1 In 2021, Russian Railways (RZD) launched a multimodal route from Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Pet (...)
17The territory of the archipelago is the territory of the monastery. It is possible to get there only by the ferry of the pilgrimage service.1 Local hotels belong to the monastery, which also oversees the tent camps. Print-outs with prayers in the pier cafe remind visitors that they should pray before and after eating. The local store sells monastery cheeses, smoked trout from its own fishery, and calvados made by the monks from Valaam apples. To come to the island means to come to the monastery and see a good owner, caring and beautifying his territory: gilded domes shining, smooth paths covered with gravel, and electric cars waiting for tourists at the pier. Nothing in this space suggests that there are other pretenders to the role of master of this land. Nothing suggests that the monastic forms of care and guardianship of Valaam are or can be contested by anyone.
18And yet, behind the glossy landscape, there are complicated relationships and conflicts surrounding the archipelago’s past. These contradictions are hidden from the eyes of tourists who come to the island for only a short visit: however, they make up the core of the memory and identity of the people who once lived here but left with the revival of the monastery. After several years of protests for their residential rights in the early 2000s, most of them left for mainland Sortavala or other cities.
19At the beginning of the project, I already had research experience and connections in the local community in Ladoga Karelia, so it was not difficult to make initial contacts with former Valaam residents who had moved to Sortavala. However, meeting and communicating with them became a challenge. My primary method is biographical interviews, which requires a high degree of confidence between the interviewer and the interviewee and a considerable willingness on the part of the interviewee to share memories. Most informants in the Russian provinces have no narrative experience in telling their life stories, but are ready to share memories when they see the attention and interest of the researcher. In the case of Valaam migrants, however, the situation was different. Many of them were involved in a tough conflict ten years ago, when they were forced to leave the inhabited area of the island. Some of them gave interviews and made public statements in various media, but failed in their attempts to prove their rights. At the same time, the dramatic events of the eviction exacerbated social conflicts within the Valaam community itself, which had never been monolithic, and provoked new lines of confrontation between its representatives. Today most of them are not enthusiastic about telling their Valaam history, believing it is finished once and for all. “If it’s about the eviction from the island, I’m not sure I want to stir it up, you can’t change anything anyway,” as one of the former islanders commented at my request.
20Sometimes I felt as if I had to go through an obstacle course in order to win trust. Once the interview started out on a mountain slope, where we were disoriented, but we ultimately found our way down to the road, much to our mutual happiness. I began each meeting with a far lengthier introduction than typical and realized that I needed to not only introduce myself and my research interests, but also to offer my own views on life and my own recollections. Throughout my work, I had a constant and overwhelming sense of being engaged in a full-fledged debate with my interviewees, sharing not just the interview space but also memories, doubts, and experiences. I wasn’t always aware of the requirements I had to fulfill in order to become a trustworthy interlocutor. Undeniably compelled to have a certain sensibility about Valaam, I could disagree with my interviewees on politics and ideology, but could not allow myself to neglect the value of the island’s unique nature, historical significance, and spiritual power.
21At the same time, when I succeeded in overcoming the skepticism of the informants, our interviews turned into long conversations, driven not so much by my guiding questions as by the personal logic of the narrators, for whom memories of Valaam life were both painful and haunting, demanding to be talked through and confessed. I discovered that the memories of Valaam had a pivotal role in shaping their personal narratives. By answering in their life stories, the unspoken question of “what events have made me what I am,” or more precisely, “what you must know about me to know me” (Linde, 1993: 20), they repeatedly revisited Valaam, reviving it in their recollections as a forever lost Promised Land.
22By the beginning of 2021, I had collected several interviews from people who had once worked on Valaam, and recorded nine more interviews that year. Three more interviews I conducted using various online services, as some former residents had moved to other towns and even other countries. In most cases, these were representatives of the so-called intelligentsia, which will be discussed in more detail below—people with higher education who arrived to the island in the mid-1980s from large cities such as Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) and Moscow. Some of my interviewees knew each other or were even friends when they lived on the island and have stayed in contact to this day. But there are also people for whom Valaam remained a place of seasonal work, not a permanent residence.
23These interviewes provided sufficient insight into a specific perspective on the past and the role of Valaam, both spiritual and secular, in the shaping of the personal memories of the late Soviet intelligentsia. This perspective significantly breaks from that of the individuals referred to below as “locals,” whom I had interviewed in previous years as well as in 2021, those who worked in and around Valaam, in the various structures that supplied the island. Valaam held little importance in their lives, serving just as one of the numerous locations where they had to carry out their job. In contrast, the late Soviet intellectuals, who are the focus of this study, consider the island to be the centerpiece of their lives and subjectivities. In the following paper, which is not a quantitative sociological analysis but rather an anthropological reading of individual cases, I will turn to a number of life stories to elaborate this specific view and interpretation.
- 2 All personal names are replaced with pseudonyms to anonymize the interviewees.
- 3 The concept of the “City of the Sun” dates back to the work of Tommaso Campanella in the early sev (...)
- 4 For a picture of the Valaam Monastery in 1988, see Meisterman, 2024.
24I met Nikolay2 in June 2021 in a village not far from Sortavala. Born in 1961 into a family of Leningrad architects, he continued the family tradition by entering the Architectural Institute. Inheriting his father’s passion for oriental philosophy, esotericism, and spiritual practices, he gathered a group of like-minded people and developed the idea of building the City of the Sun,3 inspired by the works of oriental and occidental mystics and theologians. The contradictory mix of religious beliefs, along with a desire for spaces free of state control, was typical of the late Soviet educated intelligentsia of the 1970s and 1980s, who sought refuge in kitchens and outside of big cities. After his failed attempt to establish a commune in a village near Leningrad, Nikolay moved to Valaam, where the museum-reserve was already open.4 First as a carpenter and later as a master of the maintenance and construction site (remontno-stroitel’nyi uchastok, RSU), during the period of perestroika and economic liberalization he organized his own restoration cooperative. This was conceived as a variant of a commune that would take care of the island’s historical heritage while also living according to the principles of the utopian City of the Sun that he had once dreamed of.
We take the hermitage to restoration, we live there, we restore and reconstruct for several years—pooh-pooh-pooh-pooh: we earn money, we live! We have gardens there, we build, we paint, we have frescoes there, everything. We are wearing linen shirts in the dew again [laughs] ...
- 5 He stretched the word, emphasizing each syllable, as if drawing a line under his biography, markin (...)
25Although not all of their ideas were realized, the group members managed to work on the island for a while. “Yes. We survived, we survived,” says Nikolay: “We survived, and that’s where the mo-na-ste-ry5 came in.”
26Nikolay talks to me while sitting at a big table in the courtyard of his own house in a small eco-settlement he organized with friends after leaving Valaam. His life story unfolds as a tale of searching and finding himself in Valaam, which he was forced to leave when the monastery was reestablished. Although Valaam appears in Nikolay’s life because of fortuitous circumstances, it occupies a central place in his autobiography as a place of hopes and utopias, consciously chosen and deeply anticipated. His story is full of irony and estranging chuckles, and yet noticeably echoes the memoirs-travelogues that praise the unique beauty of the island and its pristine nature, the pervasive grace and spirituality of the place.
27The same idioms of destiny and mission I heard in the retrospective story of Rita. A young school graduate from Kazakhstan, she followed her elder brother to Leningrad in 1984. She first visited Valaam during a trip with Leningrad artists, two years later she came there with a seasonal camp of the All-Russian Society for the Protection of Monuments of History and Culture (VOOPIiK), and in 1987 moved to the archipelago as a permanent resident.
At the forestry (leskhoz), I got a job. For a long time, they thought where to attach me, because, well, what—19 years old. I didn’t know what was going to happen and what was needed here in general. And girls who had higher education, who were older than me and had already graduated, they also all worked as plasterers and housepainters.
28In her memoirs, place is crucial in shaping her subjective sense of self.
And plus this formation—you’ve lived there for thirty years since you were 19, all this subjective formation—it took place on Valaam, more under the influence of nature. This natural connection within you—this crossroads of nature, it’s not going anywhere, because it’s... I used to say (this has changed now)—that on Valaam you live as if you were living in Christ’s bosom.
29The idea of the specific grace of the place, through which one finds strength and becomes oneself, is central to her story. Just as with Nikolay, Rita does not consider herself a random person on the island, nor does she regard the island itself a random place to live. Despite her work at the leskhoz, she believes that her mission was to take care of the island’s main value, which she defines as “Valaam’s spirit” (valaamskii dukh). And just like Nikolay, she interprets her forced departure from the island as an intimate loss of home.
- 6 For a detailed discussion of the concept of intelligentsia, see Tromly, 2014 and Zubok, 2009.
30Rita and Nikolay did not know each other before coming to Valaam and did not become close friends on the island. But although Nikolay came from a family of Leningrad architects and graduated from the Architectural Institute himself, whereas Rita came from Kazakhstan and never received a university diploma, they both represent what is conventionally called the “Soviet intelligentsia.” This concept, often used without translation, has been the subject of much debate and numerous definitions, discussed in terms of class and social stratum, status group, subculture, or imagined community.6 Sonja Luehrmann used the term “cultural professionals,” referring to various types of “mental labour,” including education, science, culture, and the arts (Luehrmann, 2005: 52). Jeanne Kormina and Sergey Shtyrkov apply the notion of the artistic and cultural elite, on the one hand, and cultural professionals, on the other, subsuming employees of museums and Houses of Culture, restorers, volunteers of the VOOPIiK, and other participants in “cultural work” (Shtyrkov and Kormina, 2015: 16–17). These heterogeneous and usually urban members of the Soviet intelligentsia, being among the “entrepreneurs” of spirituality (Rousselet, 2020: 47), turned out in the 1980s to be the driving force behind various processes, including the retrospective turn (Donovan, 2015; Shtyrkov and Kormina, 2015), nationalist movements (Brudny, 1998), and spiritualist revival (Dubovka, 2020; Panchenko, 2011, 2018). Not a community in a strict sense and often seeking their own autonomy, the late Soviet intelligentsia was not united by a common level of education, profession, or position, and yet represented a fairly closed group with social prestige and the conviction of their own engagement in the cultural and spiritual development of society. This group exhibited a distinct combination of diverse religious, esoteric, and occult concepts, coupled with a strong preoccupation with preserving historical heritage (Panchenko, 2011; Zitzewitz, 2016; Kozlov, 2001).
- 7 Alexei Yurchak proposed the concepts of “deterritorialization” and “living vnye” to refer to those (...)
- 8 Similar phenomena emerged in so-called cities of science, where locality and citizenry are often c (...)
31Valaam became an assemblage space for this heterogeneous community, providing the setting for a relationship in which the urban intellectuals had both authority and a specific lifestyle. By the mid-1980s, newcomers constituted a large part of the local population and considered themselves the “Valaam elite” as opposed to the “locals”—those who had lived there since the post-war years or who remained after the removal of dom invalidov. Although not all of them were close friends or even just acquaintances, these people nevertheless shared a belief in their “groupness” (Brubaker, 2004) due to a shared commitment to Valaam. Coming to the island, they not only sought to find deterritorialized spaces of “living vnye (outside)”7 (Yurchak, 2006: 128), but also saw their mission in spiritual development in this particular locale. Some of them were mobilized around the museum-reserve created in 1979. Others got jobs at the RSU or local forestry like Nikolay and Rita, but these positions were mostly nominal. Recalling their life on the island, they talk about the unique “Valaam spirit,” the care of which was their main commitment. Their rootedness in the local landscape produced not a local identity but social status and prestige, essentially making them intelligentsia.8
32In order to emphasize the connection between social position and the sense of place that allows that position to be manifested, I use the term “intimate hosts,” referring to those people whose social status and associated prestige were directly related to an inner, subjectively experienced sense of personal involvement in the fate of the place. Regardless of their positions, these people saw themselves as genuine hosts and guardians of the island, as opposed to the “locals,” for whom the archipelago remained “only” a place to live and work.
33“Intimate hosts” dwell on the local landscape as a place of a personal and intimate nature. Remembering her life on the island, Rita emotionally said: “I kept saying, you know, my history of Valaam is connected to a period of childbearing. Because I quickly remember the date, counting down when which child was born.” A temporality anchored in a time of childbearing and maternity creates a phantom space that allows her to reconcile a unique personal biography with supernatural and extra-human values through the landscape of Valaam. “Try to carry a child here on Valaam,” Rita explicates, “because grace—it doesn’t go anywhere, it affects everyone, bad and good—it’s like the sun.” The subjectivation of the island made it an important site of memory. The phantom space of grace and natural beauty, inhabited by local characters and saturated with local flavor, became for these people a hermetic world of the past lost with the arrival of the monastery.
- 9 For picture of the Orthodox procession passing archaeologists who are working on a heritage site o (...)
34The biographical narratives of the intimate hosts usually break off at a point eloquently marked by Nikolay with the words “and then the monastery came.”9 This boundary divides life into two parts: “before” and “after,” creating what Stephan Feuchtwang called the caesura which “mark the moment of creation of a relative past, the before of a given event and the after of a new present” (Feuchtwang, 2005: 2). Reflecting on this sharp temporal border, former Valaam dwellers establish not only a boundary between the past and the “new present,” but also distinguish themselves from the monastery, blamed for the dramatic breakdown in their lives. The intensity of this borderline was expressed in the headlines of the regional and federal media of the early 2000s: Novye Izvestia’s title “Out of Valaam! Monks of Ancient Monastery Evict Locals from the Island” was quite typical (Pozdnyaev, 2006).
- 10 On the distinction between life stories and life histories, see Rosenthal, 1993.
35However, the “coming of the monastery” was not a one-time event in either life stories or life histories.10 The revival of monastic life did not provoke any protest from the other inhabitants of the archipelago. The first group of monks arrived here in 1989 from Moscow’s Danilov monastery, which six years earlier had been returned to the Russian Orthodox Church, signaling the USSR’s new policy towards religion (Smolkin, 2018: 230–234). Two years later, the Supreme Soviet of the Karelian Autonomous SSR issued an official decree to return the central manor and some other buildings of the Transfiguration monastery to the Church. This was gradually done with the remaining facilities over the following few years. In 1992, the Valaam Historical, Architectural, and Natural museum-reserve was closed; by the end of the 1990s, a program to resettle local residents from Valaam started. In 2005, the Valaam village administration ceased to exist, and the territory of the archipelago came under the administration of the Sortavala town settlement, thus legitimating the resettlement of people from the island to the mainland city.
36Although the revival of the monastery is usually described in media today in terms of militant confrontation and acute conflict between secular locals and the monastery, which resulted in a dramatic breakdown in social structure and life trajectories, this momentous disruption is never associated in memories with the events of the late 1980s. On the contrary, all the accounts of the first monks’ arrival are imbued with warmth, tenderness, and even paternal care, as Nikolay recounted:
And there was such a man, Varsonophii, who came. He was a tall, two-meter tall man—a blond, curly-haired blond.… He was so big and had such blue eyes. And he’s got this spiritual… Great man, but a child—such a huge child! … But the people really treated him, they loved him.
37The emergence of the monastic community and the beginning of services in the Transfiguration cathedral were not viewed as a sign of “taking over” or “invasion.” For Valaam romantics and esoterics, students and university professors, this was a sign of liberalization and legalization of their own spiritual quests, official “permission to openly seek their spirituality,” as Rita put it. The first services were attended by museum workers and restorers, artists and biologists, tour guides and communal services employees, and are remembered with the feelings of awe-inspiring anticipation and communion.
38The combination of different religious ideas and the search for spirituality in the historical and cultural heritage that brought the urban intelligentsia to Valaam allowed them to feel like welcoming hosts, ready to share the island’s sacred space with other seekers, including Orthodox believers and monks. Meeting and welcoming them as equals, the intimate hosts saw themselves as guides and experts, caring for the newcomers and facilitating their settling into a shrine that still belonged entirely to them.
39At the same time, the Orthodox Church was associated with the unquestionable values of the past, to which the late Soviet preservationists and intellectuals turned in search of authority and instruction (Shtyrkov and Kormina, 2015: 31). According to Nikolay, “there was a moment when we wanted them to come. We saw them as, well, some kind of... some structure that preserved harmony, morality, yes, some... order.” From the monks, many intimate hosts expected an effective institution to protect the island from the dangers of decay and destruction. In the context of the museum’s constantly challenged credibility, the monastery and the Russian Orthodox Church were accepted as both more authoritative and more competent to care for Valaam’s landscape and heritage.
- 11 See the discussion of the “keeping religion in ‘its place’” argument in the context of urban strug (...)
40Many Valaam residents considered themselves true believers and actively supported the monastery’s revival. Even at the height of the conflict between the monastic structures and local residents, activists sought to distance themselves from direct accusations against the monks, distinguishing those who shared their belief in the unique spirit of Valaam from those who only cared about real estate and expensive property. The boundary between religious and secular publics was ambiguous and fragile, failing to serve as a basis for collective action and group solidarity both during and after the crisis. Seen through the eyes of the intimate hosts, the short-lived sharing of the shrine was a period of a joint search for and practice of spirituality in which the Orthodox Church was given an ambivalent and rather subordinate role.11
41When Nikolay said “and that’s where the monastery came in,” he did not refer to the revival of monastic life on the island but to the later dislocation and brutal property struggles. The most heated phases of the conflict occurred in 2007, when the courts demanded that the families of former museum employees and other secular structures be evicted from the premises that now belonged to the monastery. Some of the residents refused to leave, continuing to live in the so-called Winter Hotel, where the museum provided apartments to its staff back in the Soviet era. Long litigation, public protests, and appeals to various authorities have not changed the situation. The conflict culminated in a fire in 2016 that destroyed the building and left people de facto without housing. After a major renovation of the property, none of the previous owners were able to return and the building was transformed into the monastery hotel.
42The conflict over residency rights had considerable social and memorial consequences. The dislocated people interpreted these events as the final collapse of their hopes for co-existence and the possibility to share the island with new religious hosts. Denial of their right to live on the island also meant the loss of their authoritative position in the domain of local heritage protection, as well as their status as participants in the history of the archipelago. Their removal, legally recognized and approved, was an important symbolic act of exile—both from the territory and from the past—even though only some of them lived permanently on Valaam at the time.
43What is usually discussed in migration studies as the “lost home” effect is one of the most powerful vehicles of social mobilization, consolidating diasporas of people who have left their homes as a result of forced displacement (Long and Oxfeld, 2004; Cohen, 1997; Marschall, 2017; Hirsch and Spitzer, 2010). In these cases, memory creates phantom worlds of the abandoned past, situated in spatial realms of localized boundaries and new identities shaped by exile. The hybrid form of belonging to multiple spaces makes nostalgic narratives of home an important element in the construction of a new self. At the same time, such communities of memory create and often re-create the space of the lost homeland, endowing it with spatial qualities and material goods (Malkki, 1995). Shortly after the resettlement of a large number of families from the island in 2007, a group “Valaam—people, events, stories: a community of those for whom the island was home” was created in the social network VKontakte, which today consists of almost 1,500 members. The most active communication in the group was in 2007–2008, when participants shared photos and memories, some of which were later published (Vorobyev, 2020; Gruzdev, 2017). Although, according to recollections, people did not gather in person, the online group became an important showcase for the migrants’ community, allowing them to articulate their Valaam identity through nostalgic memories of a vanished past. In that shared space of memory, they acted as the “genuine locals” and the main heroes, the true guardians and defenders of the archipelago’s unique heritage and spirit.
- 12 For details of the island’s development, construction, and renovation projects, see the materials (...)
44Meanwhile, the Valaam landscape and the monastery’s versions of its past underwent significant changes. Landscaping, reconstruction, and the building of new hermitages and residences began on the archipelago, changing its image and giving it the glossy look that impresses tourists today.12 The monastery’s official website has added pages dedicated to its history, which has unfolded as a long path to prosperity and spiritual power. Only a short section of this chronicle was devoted to the Soviet period, entitled “Desolation. Valaam in the 1940s–1980s” (Letopis, 2024), which summarizes the entire period of the secular restoration of local heritage in one sentence.
45Valaam, a place closely associated with the social status and spiritual pursuits of the intimate hosts, was no longer accessible to them. Signs of their presence were erased from the landscape of the archipelago, and their role in protecting local heritage was downgraded. The loss of home in this context meant the loss of their own authoritative position, prestige, and coherent self, rather than the loss of property and a roof over their heads. When in the mid-2000s Valaam ceased to be a shared shrine, its former inhabitants reimagined it as a phantom space of their own memory that they did not need to share with the monastery. To this day, they maintain its imaginative borders and claim the inauthenticity of the “present” Valaam, considering it to be false, unlike the one they remember. “Valaam—it became different, completely different, just, well—another Valaam. Good or bad—that’s for later,” Anton, who grew up on the island, exclaimed emotionally.
46Many former residents are committed to the idea that this is not the Valaam that they once shared with the monastery but were later forced to abandon, but two completely different islands coexisting in two parallel realms. Unlike other migrants, for whom “trip ‘home,’ be it a genuine return to an actual former home or a first time visit to an ancestral or imagined home(land), is instrumental in negotiating one’s sense of belonging, identity and self-construal” (Marschall, 2017), Valaam’s intimate hosts avoid visiting the island and view it as completely unfamiliar. Here is a typical dialogue with Zakhar, the former leader of the volunteer restorers’ team:
Zakhar. I miss that Valaam. But not the present one. I went to Valaam about seven years ago. I couldn’t wait to go back home.
Zakhar’s wife. You can’t get him there now. I asked him many times to go there, but he won’t.
Researcher. You don’t go?
Zakhar. No, no, no... well no... it’s sad to look at, let’s put it that way. It’s been cleaned up... It’s not that ruins are better than something renovated. No. There’s no spirit there anymore. There’s nothing... absolutely nothing. You know, the one that... In our time, when we were there... there was a different... I don’t know, something different. Not this monastic one, anyway. Even these first monks, they were different.
47By asserting this fundamental difference between his Valaam, the old one, and the present one available to the public, Zakhar places the golden age of the archipelago in a time of which he himself was a part. But he also extends the life of old Valaam as a bounded phantom space that has not disappeared but continues to exist. The phantom space created and maintained by the community of dislocated Valaam intellectuals is the most important site of memory for them, allowing them to still manifest themselves as a cultural elite, bearers of spirit and defenders of heritage, despite being forcibly deprived of both their symbolic role and a literal place under the sun.
48The landscape of present-day Valaam is marked by the presence and ownership of the Orthodox monastery, which is advertised as a “Russian Northern Athos,” preserved and restored thanks to “a host of holy ascetics and elders.” Not only on the official website of the pilgrimage service, but also in the advertisements of travel agencies, a trip to Valaam is promoted as an opportunity to join the “spiritual tradition of Valaam” (Valaam Pilgrim, 2022), to “get to know the famous holy place” (Legendary Valaam, 2022), and to “touch spiritual roots” (Tours and Vouchers, 2022). The history of late Soviet Valaam does not fit into the canonical chronicle of the shrine, according to which the modern monastery is essentially rooted in Russia’s imperial past.
49In contrast to the glossy surface of the archipelago’s official history, the memory of its former inhabitants is full of contradictions and ruptures. The time of life and the time of history are intertwined in their accounts of Valaam, which was for them a place of personal memory and biography: the place is turned into a lost homeland, a Promised Land to which it is impossible to return.
50In this article, I have discussed the personal stories of those whom I call “intimate hosts,” people who have experienced the island as an important site of affective belonging and, at the same time, as a place converted into social status and identity. As I have argued, the beginning of monastic life on the island and the subsequent revival of the monastery was not a critical event for the intimate hosts, who interpreted these processes more as a liberalization of spiritual quests than as a takeover or eviction. However, the subsequent displacement from the archipelago led to social consolidation and sharpened social distinctions among its inhabitants, turning the heterogeneous community of Valaam intellectuals into a group of memory, united by a sense of a lost homeland. Unable to share the island’s landscape with the monastery, they have now created their own phantom memory space of Valaam, enclosed hermetically in their recollections.
51Can we call contemporary Valaam a shared shrine? Yes and no. On the one hand, the island is still open to visitors of different religious beliefs, including those interested in nature or architectural heritage. The quite democratic regime established by the pilgrimage service of the monastery makes it a fairly open space. On the other hand, after a brief period in the late 1980s and 1990s, Valaam is no longer an arena for negotiation, discussion, and joint religious and preservation practices. The economic and political resources of the Russian Orthodox Church do not leave room for other actors to assert their right to decide on the development of the island.
52Having ceased to be a shared shrine, Valaam has split into two islands, each of which exists in its own mode of memory: the glossy Valaam of the Northern Athos, presented in guidebooks and on the monastery’s website, and the phantom space of the former Valaam intelligentsia, existing in their memories. Without overlapping, these two islands exist quite autonomously, although they refer to the same geographical space.
53Modern theories view shared shrines as arenas where different actors, both secular and religious, engage in conflicts, negotiations, and interactions over their authority, ownership, presence, and control of the sacred site. These approaches are poorly applied to cases where these tasks are not relevant due to clear inequalities in political and economic resources between potential actors. However, we should not dismiss these situations as failures and outright rejections of the concept of shared space. In such cases, commonality, sharing, the multiplicity of actors, and their interaction are transformed into memorial phenomena that serve as an important component of the collective retrospective imaginary. Sharing without sharing is still a viable option in this scenario, allowing individuals to feel that they are participating in a process that is otherwise unattainable in real life.
