I acquired a book called North Russian Architecture in a give-away a few months back. A small item, pages of heavy high-quality paper, a wood-effect hard cover. Published 1972 in the USSR, translation by Kathleen Cook. If it didn't have pages about six inches square in area, I might call it a coffee-table book.
Opening it the last few days, I found it to be quite charming - if the sort of volume replaced these days by Wikipedia and digital photography*. Many details on the wooden Churches in Lake Onega, for instance - which really are incredible. An interesting testimony to the abundance of a resource fuelling architectural creativity.
Among the material within, I found this map, showing Solovetsky Monastery, on the islands of the same name in the middle of the White Sea.
The key is not conveniently positioned, so I reproduce it here:
Towers:
A - Spinning, B - Assumption, C - Watch, D - North, E - Kvass-Brewing, F - Kitchen, G- South, H - White
Gates:
I - Holy, II - Herring, III - St Nicholas, IV - Kvass-Brewing, V - Kitchen, VI - Assumption, VII - Archangel
Buildings:
1 - Cathedral of the Transfiguration (1558-66), 2 - Cathedral of the Assumption and refectory (1552-57), 3 - Trinity Cathedral (1859), 4 - Bell-tower (1777) and Church of St Nicholas (1834), 5 - Passage, 6 - Church of the Annunciation (1596-1601), 7 - Church of St Philip (1798-1859), 8 - Hospital building, 9-17 - living quarters and domestic buildings, 18 - Water mill, 19 - Chambers (1615), 20 - Chambers (1642).
Heady stuff - with that assortment of gates and functions and religious areas. All the more so when one reads that Ivan IV (the Terrible) gave the monks cannons. So much that adventurers could tamper with, so many options. Is the herring gate somehow enchanted for monastic anglers? Does the spinning tower revolve?
If you were primed to assume that Solovetsky Monastery was made of wood - well, so was I. However, it is of brick and stone. Don't worry; your version - in northmost Tsymric? - can be wooden.
The other unexpected discovery was in my cross-checking; as it emerges, the Solovetsky Islands were the site of one of the earliest Soviet prison camps. This makes geographic sense: in 1923, the sites of the old Tsarist penal colonies in Siberia (EG) were cut off during the Civil War, and the Allied Archangel Expedition had wrapped up by then. The White Sea would be accessible by rail from the Muscovite heartland and the islands would make escape difficult. I had encountered this before, but it hadn't lodged in my mind like the names of (say) Alcatraz, Devil's Island, Wormwood Scrubs, Botany Bay or Dartmoor. Thankfully, I have encountered attractive maps to be questioned before and I do not regret picking this up by chance.
To end on a milder note - I have encountered few other things in following up for this post, including the Anglican Church in Riga (Cf. St Olaf's, Balestrand), the Estonian and Latvian naval jacks, and the source of the Pinega River, in the Krasnoborsk marshes, at the confluence of the Black and White Rivers - which sounds like something out of the Painted Lands.
*Occasionally it lapses from art-historian technicalities or tour brochure gloss to refer to something oddly specific. See this passage, when referring to old Autumn fairs:
'...they would trade in distaffs, clay toys, household utensils and birch-bark boxes. Similar boxes painted with strange green and red flowers with white and blue leaves are still made by Dmitri Matveyevich Novinsky, a local craftsman who lives not far from Verkhnyaya Uftyuga in the village of Novoandreyevka.'