We will land on Valaam. The tour will be conducted by the abbot of the monastery himself, aka the monastery courage. We will drive around the island and see several remote hermitages, visit temples, see the botanical garden where monks grow pineapples and grapes. Finally, we will have a small talk at the local refectory.

Valaam Monastery is the center of Orthodox life in Karelia, and one of the most important monasteries in Russia. It is located on the Valaam archipelago, consisting of 50 islands. The largest island here is Valaam, where the main center of pilgrimage life is located.

The archipelago is located 22 km from the shore of Lake Ladoga and 60 km from the island.Konevets, so in summer you can only get here by water (or by air, there is also a helipad here).

There is a very picturesque nature here – stone islands grow out of the water, surrounded by pine forests there are numerous temples, and if you walk around the island, you can come across one of the drainless lakes so inherent in this landscape. There are about 480 species of plants on Valaam, many of which have been cultivated by monks since the time of Peter I. 150-year-old fruit orchards have been preserved.

In summer, there are 30-35 more sunny days on Valaam than on the mainland. No wonder its name comes from the Finno-Ugric Valamo, where valo is "light", "oath" (well, or "high ground"). It is usually warm and nice here in summer.

On a 30-meter elevation, called Tabor here, stands the Transfiguration Cathedral, a 75-meter bell tower and a monastery complex. Excursions, prayer services, and services are held here.

We will be met by one of the prominent officials of the monastery, spend the day with us, show us all the beauties of the archipelago, tell us how the life of the monastery works, and communicate with us “for life” in the monastery refectory. Along with the main building, there are 11 more monasteries on the archipelago – small monastic settlements with their own monasteries.

Active restoration of the monastery began in 1989. All the temples have been restored and restored to their historical appearance, and in 2005 a 16-ton bell-blagovest was installed on the bell tower of the monastery. Now about 100 thousand tourists visit Valaam every summer. We recommend that you feel the atmosphere of this place of power as well.

We will explore the most colorful buildings of Sortavala, and by car we will go to the marble canyon of Ruskeala. In the canyon, we will walk along the edge of the quarry with an excursion, go down into the tunnels, look at mining from the inside and understand the technology of marble production: then and now. Finally, we'll take a ferry ride through the canyon.

On the northern shore of Lake Ladoga, 37 km from the Valaam Monastery, is the town of Sortavala, one of the most important cities in Karelia. It is home to about 15,000 people

It is a former Finnish city that has retained some of its charm and architecture. It consists mainly of 3-4-storey buildings built by the most famous Finnish architects. Some of the wooden buildings of the XIX century have been preserved, as well as houses of the early XX century: massive, decorated with stone, with elongated, rounded windows – it is worth seeing these houses once to feel that it is very different from what was built at that moment in Russia. These are examples of outstanding northern architecture. We will see most of these houses during our walk through Sortavala.

After walking around Sortavala, we will be able to go to the marble canyon Ruskeala – the only monument of nature and the history of mining in Russia and Finland.

We will go there in our minibus. Along the way we will pass several Ruskeala waterfalls. They are small, 3-4 meters high. The Soviet film “And the Dawns are quiet here” was shot here.

Ruskeala is a former marble quarry filled with groundwater with a length of 460 meters and a width of up to 100 meters. Marble has been mined here by the Swedes since the 1670s. Then it was used to produce lime.

Russia began to mine marble in Ruskeala under Catherine II. At that time, large-scale construction was underway in St. Petersburg, and foreign marble was being tried in every possible way to “import substitution”. Ruskeal marble was used for the cladding of St. Isaac's Cathedral, the floors of the Kazan Cathedral were laid out with it, it was used for window sills of the Hermitage and decoration of a pair of stations of the St. Petersburg metro.

In 1939, the Soviet-Finnish War began. The quarries were abandoned and temporarily abandoned. After the war, the plant and the deposit began to be restored. But the oldest and deepest quarry was flooded with water as a result of blasting. Now in its place is a deep lake with clear water, this is the heart of the Ruskeala Mountain Park. The distance from the side of the quarry to its bottom is about 50 m.

We will walk along the tree-covered walls of the marble quarry, see the “Italian Quarry” of the 1980s – a relatively new attraction. The marble layers in it were mined using a special technology with the help of Italian equipment, so the walls in it are perfectly smooth, as if polished, and all with bizarre patterns.

The walls of the quarry are pierced by a whole system of underground workings – tunnels and drifts connected by vertical shafts. Most of them are flooded, but we'll go to the top ones! In the largest hall with an underground lake, you can simultaneously see the sky through a hole in the ground. During the walk, music plays there, and artistic lighting shimmers on the walls of the cave. The exit from the cave leads to the lake, from where they are taken back to the shore by a small ferry. Along the way, we will see how clear the water in the canyon is, which can be seen to a depth of 15 meters.

Ruskeala looks idyllic: Boating is carried out on the water surface, curious tourists walk along the marble shores, and some amateurs fly over the canyon on a zipline. We will appreciate this beauty and return home to the yacht.

We will transfer to a speedboat and rush through the narrow straits between the rocky skerries. We will go out on one of the islands to take a closer look at the local nature. Finally, we will visit Gustav Winter's cottage: we will go to the estate of the famous doctor, walk through the arboretum and eat modern Karelian cuisine in one of the best restaurants in Russia.

There is no similar landscape anywhere in Russia! The National Park is home to many Red Book animals and plants. The islands are rich in berries. Cranberries, blueberries, cloudberries grow here, and currants and gooseberries can be found on the ruins of abandoned Finnish farms.

We will sail along the skerries, enter the picturesque backwaters, land on the islands and, admiring the views, walk through the evergreen coniferous forest. Also, this is probably the best place to get our entire arsenal of water activities, whether it's jet skis, saps, inflatable toys, and have fun on the water together!

Biologists have counted about 53 species of fish in the waters of the Ladoga skerries. They mainly catch pike, perch, roach, burbot and walleye. If there is a desire, we can take gear and arrange fishing here, or ask a professional fisherman to show us “their places” and share sacred knowledge. Fishing in skerries is one of the most exciting men's activities. Who doesn't like to drag fish out of the water one by one, which will be cooked on fire today?

We will stop at Cape Taruniemi (translated from Finnish – “fabulous”), look at the estate of Dr. Gustav Winter.

The doctor was a famous surgeon, his name was well-known not only in Finland, but also in St. Petersburg. He specialized in thyroid surgery and obstetrics. With him, the number of operations in the district hospital increased 8 times. In 1902, he built a maternity hospital with his own money, where he was the head physician himself.

We will enter the estate of Dr. Winter, which was built for him in 1909 on the shores of Retulahti Bay by the famous Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. High stairs made of Serdobol granite lead to the terrace and into the house, to the fireplace room. We will see carefully restored interior items from the time of Dr. Winter, archival documents and old photographs, and the guide will tell the history of the estate.

Let's take a separate look at the work of the philosopher-artist Nikolai Roerich, who lived in the Northern Ladoga region for more than two years, visited Gustav Winter and painted more than 200 paintings here.

Let's take a walk through the arboretum, compiled by the famous doctor. Mr. Winter was an enthusiastic person, so he studied landscape design in Italy. On the territory of his cottage, he collected more than 70 species of plants not peculiar to the Ladoga area. He bought some of them from a botanical nursery created by monks on the island of Valaam, and the other part was sent to him by grateful patients.

Finally, we can try modern Karelian cuisine at a local restaurant, which in 2021 and 2022 won the award for the best hotel restaurant in Russia.

Let's look at the authentic wooden peasant huts of the 18th century. Let's go to the workshops, try different crafts and choose a craft to our liking. Let's steam in the Russian bathhouse with brooms and learn the rules of drinking in the vodka museum!

Before you get to the village of Mandrogi, you must go upstream of the Svir River, near the shores of which the village is located.

Svir – connects the two largest lakes of the European part of Russia: it flows out of Onega and flows into Ladoga. Since the time of the Vikings, Svir has been used as a trade route. By 1808, the path was completed and strengthened, and since then this river has been part of the waterway connecting the Volga with the Baltic Sea.

Mandrogi is a village with chopped wooden huts and houses decorated with intricate carvings and painted in bright colors. This oasis of crafts was built on the site of the village of Verkhniye Mandrogi, which burned down during the war. It began to be restored in the late 90s, when the huts of the XIX century were transported here from the Vologda region on logs. These huts were lovingly assembled and equipped. At the moment, there are 8 huts in the village, each with several craft workshops.

A little later, in 2017, the wooden chapel of the Prophet Elisha, opened in 1899 and abandoned in 1939, was moved to the village. Now the church has been restored, filled with icons, and a prayer service is held in it every week.

In the village, we will be able to learn how to weave, forge iron, sew dolls, carve wood and paint created creations, weave from birch bark. We will play traditional musical instruments and learn how they are made, ride a horse, learn about the structure of the northern house and the rules by which a large peasant family lived, and how they celebrated weddings. Especially tired travelers can immediately go to taste Russian vodka, learn the rules of drinking and learn to understand its varieties and the nuances of their preparation. Before returning on board, we recommend going to the Russian sauna with wood, and with brooms!

Together with the director of the museum-reserve, we will inspect the monuments of wooden architecture of Kizhi, learn interesting stories about the protected island firsthand. We will drive around the island and have a picnic with a magnificent view of the distant distances and water meadows.

In the North of Lake Onega, Kizhi shine like a pearl in a necklace of islands.

Kizhi is rightfully considered one of the most beautiful islands of Karelia. People inhabited it in the most ancient times. All the time of its existence, the churchyard was famous for crafts. It was a cultural center where poets and artists lived and worked. The ownership of the craft was passed down from father to son. Epics about Ilya Muromets and Vladimir Krasnoe Solnyshko were born here.

Back in the days of tsarist Russia, the Kizhi pogost was a prosperous administrative center of the empire. The income from profitable copper factories allowed the construction of churches unique in their architecture. During industrialization, Karelian villages were deserted. But after the Second World War (October 2, 1945) The Kizhi pogost was declared a state nature reserve.

A real open-air Museum has been created here. Throughout Zaonezhye and other Karelian regions, ancient huts, barns and mills are still being collected, brought to the island and restored. Arriving here, one gets the impression that one has been transported back a couple of hundred years.

The nature of Kizhi perfectly complements the wooden buildings of the island. The views and atmosphere here are such that climbing the hill, you want to cry from how beautiful it is! A mill by the road, a log village by the water, and green meadows all around, a church stands alone on a hill in the distance, surrounded on all sides by narrow straits, other islands are visible nearby – with forest isthmuses and no less idyllic views…

The most remarkable building on the island is the 22nd main Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord, built in 1714. According to one legend, the carpenter Nestor built it without a single nail, with one axe, and after finishing the work he threw the axe into the lake so that no one could repeat such beauty.

We will tour all the sights with a titled guide. Wooden buildings feel completely different from the inside, so we will look at the interiors of residential buildings, enter churches, climb the bell tower.

The island feels much bigger than it looks on the map. At its peak, there were 14 villages on the island. To date, only two of them have been preserved: Yamka and Vasilevo. We will take a horse-drawn carriage or bicycles to get to these villages and see the other beauties of the island. We can even have a picnic on the hill, with views of Lake Onega and the meadows around it.

We will land on a picturesque sandy beach, walk along Cape Besov Nos and try to find all the petroglyphs. We will take a motorboat ride along the local river to join the local nature and, if desired, go fishing.

The picturesque eastern shore of Lake Onega was inhabited immediately after the glacier left these places. The territories freed from ice were overgrown with forest, herds of elk and deer came here. And after them – primitive hunters and tribes. They brought with them culture and mythology, traces of which remained imprinted on the Karelian rocks in the form of petroglyphs – rock carvings.

Cape Besov Nos is considered to be the most famous and most mysterious place of petroglyphs accumulation. It juts out into the lake at 750 meters, and, due to its convenient location, has been used from time immemorial to the present day as a significant geographical landmark.

Researchers almost unanimously come to the conclusion that Cape Besov Nos was a large pagan sanctuary where the ancestors of modern Finns and Karelians held sacraments and sacrifices. It has existed for more than a thousand years. The granite slabs of the cape are directly dotted with rock carvings hollowed out to a depth of 2-5 mm by impacts of harder stones. According to the most approximate estimates, more than 500 petroglyphs are concentrated on the cape. This is the richest collection of petroglyphs in Scandinavia and Finland!

The devil's nose is named after the largest image – the “demon". This is a drawing of a humanoid figure 2.3 m high carved in stone. The name is conditional, which was fixed for it thanks to the monks from the Murom monastery lying 25 km south of the cape. What kind of “demon” is this – we can only guess.

Cape Besov Nos and Cape Periy Nos and Cape Kladovets, located a kilometer away, are a complex of ancient sanctuaries and a storehouse of rock paintings more than 5 thousand years old! More than 50 ancient sites dating back to the V-VI millennium BC have been discovered in the vicinity.

The territories here are protected, the road bridge has collapsed, and you can only get to the cape by water. But despite this, the paths are equipped with comfortable decking with railings, and there is even an observation tower – apparently, instead of a non–working wooden lighthouse. There is a kilometer–long bay with gentle sandy beaches and views between Besov Nos and Kladovets - an ideal place to swim, frolic in the water, and spend the day alone with nature!

We'll spend the whole day on the water. All the water activities that we decide to take on board are at our service: saps, jet skis, a motor boat with a full set of fishing gear. There are also sunbeds and delicious food. Seal!

Konevets Island is a small 5x2 kilometer island located 5 kilometers off the Western shore of Lake Ladoga. We will just be passing through the Konevetsky Strait, which separates the island from the land – why not stop here, stretch your legs and take a walk for an hour or two?

• This is an ancient monastery founded by the wonderworker Arseny Konevsky back in 1393. Like the Valaam Monastery, it was known for its missionary activities, or rather for the conversion of local pagan Karelians to Christians.

  The island was named after a huge 750-ton stone in the shape of a horse's skull. The stone was nicknamed – the horse-stone, and the island – Konevets. Pagans used to use the stone for their rituals, but then it was consecrated and a chapel was built right on this huge boulder!

• In 1800-1809, thanks to the increased monetary maintenance of monasteries during the reign of Paul I, a huge two-storey eight-column Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin was built on the island according to the project of local elders. A 35-meter bell tower is being built next to the cathedral. On the site of the ancient location of the monastery, two monasteries are being built — Konevsky and Kazan. The fame of the monastery gradually grew, and on June 28, 1858, Emperor Alexander II and his family visited the island, around the same time Alexander Dumas and Fyodor Tyutchev visited the monastery. After the revolution, the monastery ended up on the territory of Finland. The Finnish military were stationed in the hotels. In 1940, the monks evacuated to Finland together with the main shrine of the monastery – the Konevsky icon of the Mother of God, brought back by St. Arseny from Mount Athos. In Finland, they founded the Novo Valaam Monastery, which still exists today.
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• The new history of the Konevsky Monastery began in 1990, when the Soviet military left the island. Of course, they did not do any restoration work, and the monastery was in a deplorable state. Little by little, tons of garbage were removed from the island, minor repairs were carried out, the monastery became habitable, but remained in ruins.

  Until 2016, when the monastery began to be actively restored with Rosneft's money. By 2020, the church and the monasteries were completely restored in 4 years, and a new infrastructure was built: a pier and a lighthouse. Vladimir Putin visited the monastery more than once to monitor the progress of the work. Now the monastery looks as good as it probably looked 170 years ago when Alexander II visited it. Or maybe even better.

• The island has wonderful nature, pines, birches, linden trees, aspens, plane trees, maples grow here. The sandy shores are washed by Lake Ladoga, and you just want to indulge in deep thoughts. We recommend you to visit!