Father Roman (left) rings one of the Danilov bells at Lowell House. Photograph by Hieromonk Andronik / Courtesy Danilov Monastery

Father Roman is the head bell ringer at the Danilov Monastery, the working residence of the Moscow Patriarch and the seat of the Holy Synod. But the first time he rang the monastery’s original bells was in 2003, at Harvard’s Lowell House, where they had hung since the early years of Stalin’s Terror, when bell ringing was banned throughout Soviet Russia. I met Father Roman this past June, when he returned to Harvard to help commemorate the bells’ repatriation. He was presented to me rather abruptly by one of the Lowell House masters. “This is Father Roman,” she announced, and, turning, I beheld a towering figure in his early thirties, well over six feet tall, with enormous hands and a flowing chestnut beard, wearing a long black habit and a skufya, the black pointed cap of a Russian Orthodox monk. “And this,” she continued, gesturing toward an easel, “is a picture of Father Roman.” A large photograph showed a gray-eyed man in a belfry, beard blowing in the wind, against a leaden sky crossed by the ropes of Russian church bells. When I asked Father Roman whether I might meet with him later in the day, he produced from the folds of his habit a slim black Nokia telephone, whose ring tone, I learned, was a recording of Russian church bells.

The eighteen Danilov bells, which range in weight from twenty-two pounds to thirteen tons, were among the last to ring in the Soviet Union. Cast between 1682 and 1907, they are one of only a few intact sets of pre-Revolutionary Russian bells in existence. Some of them tolled at the burial of Nikolai Gogol. In the nineteen-thirties, the Danilov Monastery was converted into a “colony” for the children of dissidents. Most of the monks were shot in 1937, during the Great Purge, but the bells escaped the country. In 1930, an American philanthropist purchased the entire set at scrap-metal prices—about eighteen thousand dollars—and donated it to Harvard. The bells hung in Lowell House, where they rang on Sundays—as well as after home football victories, and victories over Yale, regardless of venue—for more than seventy years.

In 1983, Danilov became the first monastery to be officially returned to the Russian Orthodox Church. The belfry was restored, and equipped with fifteen bells, salvaged from various defunct churches. But these bells were mismatched, and some had been severely damaged. In 1988, Ronald Reagan expressed openness to the idea of returning the bells during a visit to the Danilov Monastery, where a photograph of Ronald and Nancy Reagan hangs to this day. But many things had to change, both in Russia and at Harvard, before the return could take place.

Ten years ago, as an undergraduate living at Lowell, I knew nothing about the bells’ provenance, or the hopes and fortunes they embodied. I had a vague sense that they were old, and a more vivid sense of their being rung every Sunday at one in the afternoon—an hour at which I particularly liked to be undisturbed by loud clanging noises. The bells were the purview of a student group called the Klappermeisters, who took a keen interest in house traditions. For fifteen minutes on end, they hammered out peculiarly tuneless variations on melodies like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

In Russian history and culture, church bells occupy a mysteriously important position. Their tolling, Father Roman told me, has been known to bring miserly or hard-hearted people to repentance, and to dissuade would-be murderers and suicides. In “Crime and Punishment,” Raskolnikov falls into a guilt-induced fever, hearing the ringing of Sunday church bells; he gives himself away by returning to the scene of the crime and compulsively ringing the murder victim’s doorbell. In “War and Peace,” the Kremlin’s bells ring during Napoleon’s invasion, disquieting the Grande Armée. Considered in Russian folklore to be animate beings, bells exercise a profound power over humankind—a power that lay dead or dormant for most of the twentieth century. The return of the Danilov bells represents the hope that this power might finally be recovered.

In the Russian Orthodox faith, bells are widely considered to be “aural icons,” symbolizing the trumpet calls blown on Mt. Sinai and the sounding of the trumpet for the raising of the dead before the Last Judgment. Just as painted icons are not intended to be mimetic representations of a spiritual object but magical windows into the world of the spiritual, a Russian bell is not a musical instrument but, as Father Roman puts it, “an icon of the voice of God.” A Russian bell, he said, must sound rich, deep, sonorous, and clear, for how can the voice of God be otherwise? It must be loud, because God is omnipotent. Above all, Russian bells must never be tuned to either a major or a minor chord. “The voice of a bell is understood as just that,” he said. “Not a note, not a chord, but a voice.” Whereas Western European bells are tuned on a lathe to produce familiar major and minor chords, a Russian bell is prized for its individual, untuned voice, produced by an overlay of numerous partial frequencies, with only approximate relations to traditional pitches—a feature that gave the Lowell Klappermeisters’ performances the denatured effect of music played on a touch-tone telephone. Where Western European bells play melodies, Russian bell ringing consists of rhythmic layered peals.

The afternoon I met Father Roman, I climbed the hundred and twenty-eight steps to the top of the Lowell bell tower. In the belfry were Father Roman, five of his Danilov colleagues, and Konstantin Mishurovsky, one of the bell ringers at the Kremlin. The window openings in the belfry were covered by netting. Outside, the distant Boston skyline glittered against an overcast sky. On the floor lay tiny feathers and other traces of falcon life, along with a few discarded fluorescent-orange foam earplugs of a type worn by some bell ringers—to the contempt of other bell ringers. Mishurovsky told me that earplugs prevent ringers from achieving the requisite delicate touch. When I asked him about hearing loss, he sighed, and said, “People always ask me this question. And to all of them I answer the same thing: Ehhh?”

At Lowell House, the largest bell was known as the Mother Earth bell. The Russians call it simply Bolshoy (“big”) or Blagovestnik (“bearer of good tidings”), because the biggest bell is always used to play the _blagovest—_deep, regular tolls that announce the beginning of a service. The three largest bells are decorated with inscriptions in Old Church Slavonic, depictions of saints, or imperial medallions; the oldest bell in the collection—purportedly cast by a famous master, Fyodor Matorin, in 1682—also has cherubs, and what resembles a face of Bacchus, open-mouthed and surrounded by grapes. Unlike Western church bells, which move when they are rung, Russian bells remain stationary, and are rung by means of ropes attached to the clappers. To ring the vestibule-size Mother Earth bell in the Lowell belfry (every belfry is set up differently), one or two people stood inside the bell on an elevated platform, swinging the thirteen-hundred-pound clapper on a rope. The remaining bells were rung from a lower platform: the bass bells controlled by foot pedals; the tenors and altos, by a crisscross web of ropes. The “trills”—the smallest bells, some no bigger than a top hat—were attached to reinlike ropes held in the right hand and rung with a flicking wrist motion, producing an eerie birdlike jangle.