On a cold northern island in the White Sea, a monk called Savvatiy and later a priest called Zosima and a hermit called German built a monastery in the 1430s that would become one of the richest and most powerful in Russia. The Solovetsky Islands, six in all, lie about a hundred and fifty kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, and the monks turned them into a self-sufficient little kingdom, with fish ponds, mills, salt works and a harbour, and a great fortress, built in the sixteenth century with boulders the size of cars. The Cathedral of the Transfiguration, with its massive whitewashed walls and onion domes, stands at the centre of a walled compound that looks, from the water, like a medieval city. UNESCO listed the ensemble in 1992.
There is a darker chapter too. After the Revolution, the Soviet authorities turned the monastery into a prison camp, among the first of the Gulag, and in the 1920s and 1930s thousands of prisoners, intellectuals, clergy and ordinary people, were held and many died here. The monastery was returned to the Church in the 1990s, and today monks again live and pray inside the walls, and the memory of the camp is marked by crosses and memorials.
You cannot ride a bike here in the usual sense. The islands have no road link, and the only ways to reach them are the summer ferries from Kem or Belomorsk on the Karelian coast, which take a few hours, or a small plane from Arkhangelsk. The nearest places for fuel and supplies are on the mainland, and on the island you will find only a few gravel tracks and local shops. Walking and cycling are the norm, and renting a bicycle is popular.
The weather is cold and changeable, with sea fog, wind and long white nights in June, when the sun hardly sets. Winters are severe, and the sea freezes. Summer, from late June to August, is the only season for visitors. Mosquitoes can be fierce.
Belugas, the white whales, come close to the shore in summer. Travel to Russia is currently complicated for foreigners, so check conditions before you plan.