Image:Prokudin-Gorskii-09-edit1.jpg

Early color photograph from Russia, created by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii as part of his work to document the Russian Empire from 1909 to 1915.

The Monastery of St. Nil on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver Province.

This version has been downsampled and cropped from the original by jjron; see link below for full-size original.

Full caption from The Library of Congress exhibition "The Empire That Was Russia:
View of the Nilova Monastery. The Monastery of St. Nil' on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver' Province, northwest of Moscow, illustrates the fate of church institutions during the course of Russian history. St. Nil (d. 1554) established a small monastic settlement on the island around 1528. In the early 1600s his disciples built what was to become one of the largest, wealthiest, monasteries in the Russian Empire. The monastery was closed by the Soviet regime in 1927, and the structure was used for various secular purposes, including a concentration camp and orphanage. In 1990 the property was returned to the Russian Orthodox Church and is now a functioning monastic community once more.

This work is from the collections of the United States Library of Congress. No information on copyright protection or usage restrictions has been given for this particular work, thus it is presumed to be in the public domain in the United States.

Edited by jjron