Kizhi Island is one of the great sights of Russia, and the main reason most travellers come to Petrozavodsk. The island is an open-air museum of wooden architecture on Lake Onega, but calling it a museum undersells it — this is a genuine, extraordinary landscape of domed churches, windmills, and traditional farmhouses assembled from different parts of Karelia, set on a flat island surrounded by the vast northern lake.
The centrepiece is the Church of the Transfiguration, a soaring 37-metre structure with 22 onion domes that looks, from a distance, like something drawn by a child's imagination rather than built by human hands. Hydrofoils run from the Petrozavodsk river station several times daily in summer; the trip takes about 1.5 hours each way. Allow a full day: the island is larger than it looks and there is much to explore.