The monasteries of the Great and Upper Desert were founded by Saint Abraham, known as the Chukhloma and Gorodets miracle worker. A monk named Serapion, from one of these monasteries, became the founder of the Serapion Desert. He lived in solitude and prayer by the Viga River, where he built a small chapel that never turned into a monastery. According to the census in 1628, a hundred years after these events, there were two wooden churches in the Serapion Desert: the Transfiguration and the Resurrection. Only in 1820, on the site of the wooden Transfiguration church, thanks to the efforts of parishioners and titular advisor Grigory Korobov, a new stone church was erected in honor of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ on Tabor, with altars in honor of Saint Nicholas and Saint Serapion, Archbishop of Novgorod. In the surrounding villages lived descendants from Novgorod lands, who honored their archbishop and brought a relic of the saint from the Trinity-Sergius Lavra.

In the 1920s, the Transfiguration church had the best male choir in the district, which included three brothers, the Khristoforovs: Nikolai, Ivan, and Konstantin, the Brovkina brothers: Vladimir and Alexander, as well as Mikhail Tepliakov from the village of Puzirevo. All choir members knew music theory and played on homemade instruments resembling a xylophone, made from planks of different types of wood.

By the order of Vasily Lvov and Nikolai Sokolov, the church began to be looted and destroyed. Local residents took church utensils and icons, while books were used for household needs. There were plans to turn the building into a club, but people were afraid to sing and dance under its arches. For the construction of a flax factory, bricks were needed, and the church began to be dismantled, but no one wanted to clean the bricks from the old mortar. Then the factory management offered payment of three kopecks for each cleaned brick. The fence, winter, and summer churches were dismantled, while the bell tower stood the longest. In 1967-1968, when plans were made for the construction of a new building for the flax factory, the church was remembered again. Initially, they tried to destroy the bell tower's walls with cables and tractors, but they held firm. Then they smashed four supports with hammers, laid wooden planks underneath, and set them on fire, after which the bell tower collapsed.

The church has long disappeared, and the former cemetery has overgrown with forest. Under the gloomy fir trees, one can find several ancient gravestones with touching epitaphs, and nothing more.