The Attack of the English on the Solovets Monastery, 1854

The Solovetsky Monastery was founded in 1436 on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in northwestern Russia. After becoming an economic and political center of the White Sea region in later centuries, the monastery also served as a frontier fortress which in the 16th and 17th centuries succeeded in repelling several enemy attacks, e.g. by the Swedes. Pilgrimage to the site was eventually stimulated by international conflict. This lithograph from 1868 shows the British naval onslaught on Solovetsky Monastery during the Crimean War in 1854. In the following years pilgrims arrived in growing numbers, inspected the bullet holes from the attack, and "crawled over pyramids of cannonballs".

Napadenie Anglichan na Stavropigial'nyi Solovetskii Monastyr' (The Attack of the English on the Solovets Monastery), lithograph, 1868, artist: E. Iakovlev (lithographer); source: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, image ID 479652, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-b151-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, public domain.