Sekirnaa Gora, Bolshoy Solovetsky Island

Sekirnaya Gora is a hill on Bolshoi Solovetsky Island. Its height is 77.5 meters above sea level. It is administratively part of the Solovetsky rural settlement of the Primorsky District of the Arkhangelsk Region of Russia. On the mountain there is the Ascension Skete of the Solovetsky Monastery. At the very top of Sekirnaya Mountain is a church-lighthouse.

Geologist Alexander Inostrantsev, who conducted geological research in Solovki at the end of the 19th century, argued that Sekirnaya Mountain was formed by glacial deposits.

In the 1920s and 1930s, this was the site of a punishment cell, the 4th branch of the Solovetsky Special Camp, a kind of Solovetsky punishment cell. Patriarch Kirill recalled his grandfather, who survived that time: "That same grandfather, Vasily Stepanovich, who later became Father Vasily, told me, as a child, about all this. He talked about how he never had fear in his heart, never. That it was impossible to frighten him, even though he was on the verge of death, being with St. Hilarion at the same time in the Solovki and having gone through the terrible ordeal of the punishment cell on Mount Sekirnaya. Few people survived this ordeal, people usually died. But my grandfather survived. My father was ordained first as a deacon and then as a priest when he got out of those prisons in 55, almost 10 years after my father took the vows, and he served in a distant Bashkir village until he was ninety-one. I keep his precepts, his commandments. And for me it was a living experience and a living image of a man who knew what the love of God was.

The side aisle of the church now houses the Penitentiary Museum.