Russian Bishop's House

The Russian Bishop’s House is a two-story log structure of about 42 by 63 feet, divided into nine bays and covered by a hip roof. Shed-roof galleries 14 feet wide extend the east and west ends and once held stairwells, storage, latrines and entrances. It stands at Lincoln and Monastery Streets in Sitka and is a National Historic Landmark.

Finnish laborers brought in by the Russian American Company built it between 1841 and 1843 as housing for Ivan Veniaminov, the first Bishop of Alaska, later canonized as Innocent of Alaska. From Sitka he oversaw Orthodox missionary and educational work among the Indigenous peoples of southern Alaska, nearly doubling the number of Orthodox worshippers in the region between 1841 and 1860.

Missionary work continued after the United States bought Alaska in 1867 and was cut back significantly only after funding dropped in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. The seat of the Russian diocese moved to San Francisco in 1872, and the house became housing for priests, with an inn on the first floor for a time. A bishop was again assigned to Sitka in 1903, and for most of the 20th century the upper floors held a chapel and the bishop’s quarters. In the 1920s the ground floor housed a printing operation that produced church publications and two local newspapers.

The exterior was altered over the years: the south facade was sheathed in clapboard around 1851, and the galleries were roofed in metal then and covered in board-and-batten siding in 1887. The interior was also altered repeatedly, and a major restoration followed after the National Park Service acquired the property in 1973. The grounds include the Old School, built in 1897 as a kindergarten and girls’ school, and House 105, one of the oldest buildings in Sitka.