Kizhi is a small island in Lake Onega, about 70 kilometres northeast of Petrozavodsk, and it holds one of the most extraordinary collections of wooden architecture anywhere in the world. The island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and deservedly so.
The centrepiece is the Church of the Transfiguration, built in 1714 and crowned with 22 onion domes that cascade upward in a way that seems almost impossible in timber. The story goes that it was built without a single nail — the logs fitted together by notch and groove alone. Whether or not that is strictly true, the craftsmanship is staggering. Alongside it stands the smaller, winter-use Church of the Intercession (1764) and a bell tower, the three structures forming the Kizhi Pogost ensemble that anchors the whole island.
Beyond the pogost, the open-air museum spreads across the island with farmhouses, windmills, chapels and granaries relocated from across the Karelia region. Walking between them gives a real sense of how people lived in the Russian north a few centuries ago. The island is quiet, the lake enormous, and on a clear day the light on the water makes the whole place feel genuinely remote — which, in a sense, it is.