According to legend, Duke Gleb of Beloozero was caught in one of the lake's ferocious storms in 1269 and cast ashore on the island, where he discovered a small community of monks already living there. Grateful for his survival, the duke funded the construction of the first timber cathedral. The stone ramparts that give the island its name -- Kamenny means "stone" -- were not natural formations but walls built by the monks themselves, ring after ring of masonry intended to stop the lake from eroding their tiny domain. The monastery grew wealthy despite its isolation, eventually owning seven large villages, four medium ones, 98 small ones, two salt pans in Totma, and two branch operations in Vologda. From a patch of rock barely visible from shore, an empire of faith and commerce radiated outward.

Under Dmitry Donskoy, a Greek monk named Dionisius took charge and imposed the coenobian rule of Mount Athos. The brethren dressed identically, ate together in the refectory -- meals usually limited to bread and sparse vegetables -- and possessed nothing of their own. Female animals were banned from the island to prevent impure thoughts. The monastery reached its peak under Paisiy Yaroslavov, a former head of the Trinity Lavra and one of the most influential clerics of his era. Paisiy authored The Tale of the Kamenny Monastery and commissioned the great painter Dionisius to create a deesis for the cathedral. When the monastery burned in 1476, Ivan III's brother Andrey Menshoy funded a new stone cathedral, completed in 1481 by masters from Rostov. These same builders went on to construct similar cathedrals at the Ferapontov Monastery in 1490 and the Kirillo-Belozersky Monastery in 1497 -- Kamenny's cathedral was the prototype.

By the 16th century, the tiny island could not compete with its larger monastic neighbors. Kamenny declined into obscurity, remembered in Moscow primarily as a place of exile. The famous Old Believer Ivan Neronov was among those deported here. On July 24, 1774, one of the exiles set the monastery ablaze, and the monks were evacuated to Vologda for 26 years. They returned in 1801 and restored the cathedral with five domes instead of the original one. Then came the Soviet era. The government closed the monastery in 1925 and evacuated the remaining monks. The buildings became a penal colony for juvenile offenders -- a venture that failed within a decade. By 1937 the island was deserted, and regional officials seized the opportunity to dynamite the oldest stone building in the Russian North, intending to use the salvaged bricks for a local "palace of culture." The palace was never built. The bricks were wasted. The cathedral's ruins remain where they fell.

For decades, the only structure marking this once-vital site was the church belltower from the 1540s, a solitary vertical accent rising from the rubble. Volunteers from Vologda and Moscow began repair work, piece by piece. In October 2017, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church officially reopened the Spaso-Kamenny Preobrazhensky Monastery, appointing Dionysius Vozdvizhenskiy as its new hegumen. The restoration is painstaking and far from complete, but the belltower now stands repaired, visible across the lake as it has been for nearly five centuries. From the air, the island remains what it has always been: an almost impossibly small footprint in an enormous expanse of water, daring you to believe that anything lasting could be built there at all.