During the talk about Karelia we will see not only beautiful nature full of forests, marshes, lakes, rivers, streams and boulders, but also monasteries, picturesque country cottages, wooden churches and chapels. We will learn all sorts of interesting facts about the rich history and the present. We will follow in the footsteps of folklore collectors who recorded the unique epics of the Karelians and Russians in remote villages. Karelia, an autonomous republic in the north of the European part of Russia, occupies an area more than twice the size of the Czech Republic, while the population density is almost forty times smaller. The local landscape is mostly covered by vast forests, swamps and many lakes, the most famous of which are Ladoga and Onega. These are also the largest in Europe. The Karelian pine has a good reputation with carpenters, the Karelian birch with joiners. The local iron was used to make weapons that aided the victories of the Russian armies. Granite from the local quarries came in handy for the magnificent buildings in St Petersburg and for the tombstone of Napoleon in Paris and Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow. Karelia is home to the largest deposit of the remarkable rock shungite, named after the small village of Shunga on the shores of Lake Onega. The remote Karelian villages and solitudes are popular with collectors of folk tales. These were recorded by rural storytellers and singers in long epics called runes. Elias Lennrot also came here and compiled his writings in his Kalevala, the most famous work of Finnish literature. The villages where the Russian population lives have managed to collect as many ancient legends as anywhere in Russia, where they have long since fallen almost into oblivion. They are called herbs, and they are the famous stories of Ilya Muromets, Ales Popovich, Dobrynya Nikitich, and Sadko of Novgorod. A huge number of ancient wooden churches, chapels and crosses have been preserved in Karelia. Often these are gems of folk architecture. Two magnificent churches with many domes on Kizhi, a tiny island on Lake Onega, have become world famous. The monumental brick monasteries rank among the most important pilgrimage sites of Orthodox Russia. Much of the rural architecture consists of picturesque wooden cottages and lavish farmhouses. Karelia was the scene of battles between the Swedes and the Principality of Novgorod in times of war, not only in the Middle Ages but in the early modern period. During World War II, Finnish and Soviet troops clashed here. In Soviet times, unfortunately, Karelia was not spared the terrible repression of the Stalinist regime. Between 1931 and 1933, thousands of prisoners perished in inhumane conditions during the construction of the more than 200-kilometre-long White Sea Canal connecting the White Sea with Lake Onega. On one of these islands of the White Sea stood a famous and magnificent 15th century monastery. In 1923, it was transformed into an infamous gulag. Karelia is not only a region with an interesting history and preserved folk architecture, but above all a region with a nature that can be both harsh and welcoming, depressingly bleak and incredibly beautiful.

The land of a thousand lakes in the European part of Russia will be presented by the traveller Libor Drahonovsky.