This paper studies the shared shrine of Valaam, an important outpost of official Orthodoxy and a pilgrimage destination in contemporary Russia, but which still retains its significance as a site of memory and utopia for the secular urban intellectuals who engaged in its preservation in the late Soviet years. The personal accounts of former residents forced to leave the archipelago after the revival of the monastery in the late 1990s and early 2000s are the core focus of the paper, allowing it to elaborate on the memory community of “intimate hosts” and the “phantom space” of the shrine as manifested through memories of a lost homeland. Unable to share the island’s landscape with the monastery, the former Valaam preservationists have created their own phantom world of Valaam, enclosed hermetically in their recollections.