5 Days in Karelia

There is no train called the Ruskeala Express that runs from Saint Petersburg, whatever the ads suggest. What exists is a short branch line from Sortavala to the Ruskeala Mountain Park station, and since 1 June 2019 a steam-hauled retro train has run on it, styled after the Tsar's Nikolaev Express. The timetable lists the steam train at 10:05 as a daily service, the 10:50 as another daily retro train, and a third on some dates at 14:25. Coming back, trains leave Ruskeala at 17:00 and 18:55 (the steam one) every day.

So the honest recipe is the Lastochka plus the 10:50 retro train, with a 30 minute change. Both retro trains have period interiors and restaurant cars that sell kalitki (open rye pasties, see the food section) and fish pie. If you buy a return ticket in the RZD app or site, the way back is 20 percent cheaper. Buy early: the train is popular and the park queues start when it arrives.

The quarries were found by a pastor and local historian, Samuel Alopaeus, and work began in 1765, early in the reign of Catherine II. Ruskeala marble faces Saint Isaac's Cathedral (its architect, Auguste de Montferrand, came himself to pick the stone), floors the Kazan Cathedral and lines the window sills of the Hermitage. By 1846 up to 800 people worked here. The mine stopped for the war in 1939, restarted in 1947 for lime and crushed stone, and closed in the early 1990s; the pit filled with groundwater, and the park opened in 2005. The main quarry is about 460 m long, 100 m wide and more than 50 m deep, and the water is clear to 15-18 m.

Walk the loop around the edge, and add the guide if you want the stories (about 1 hour 15 minutes, 1,600 m). The other options are the Mountain Masters trail (2,600 m, 1,150 RUB) and the history center. Park entry is 750 RUB on the ticket page (the 650 RUB figure there is for the history center only). In winter snow covers the spoil heaps and the water freezes, and the park asks you not to walk onto the canyon ice. Hours on the site read 11:00 to 21:00 daily.

The cliffs are riddled with galleries, and after the war most of the underground workings flooded, so the only way in is a guided tour of 850 m with helmets provided. You see the old galleries lit in colors, and the underground lake from a walkway, with music playing. It is theatrical rather than scientific, and it is the part that still looks good when the canyon is grey.

Tours run in sessions with a fixed number of places, and on summer weekends they sell out by morning. The park's own site still lists the tour in November 2026, but winter session times were not published, so ask when you buy. The cave is cool all year, so take a fleece even in July. Between February and May the park has held an ice sculpture festival in the caves, The Secret of the Depth, but only when the winter is cold enough.

Kalitka is the Karelian pasty: a small open boat of rye dough with a filling, traditionally millet porridge, now potato, curd, fish or berries. The park's own site calls it the calling card of Karelian cooking and sends you to Cafe Leto for it. A Karelian writer in T-Zh runs there first for the one with potato and trout, though she says good kalitki are hard to find and that many are dry and tough.

So treat this as a tasting, not a verdict. Eat it hot, hold it by the crimped edge, and compare it with the one you will get at Dom Berga in the evening. The park has several other cafes, among them Ruskolka (fish soup and kalitki, mixed 2026 reviews on price) and Kahvila (coffee and pastries). Bring a snack and a thermos; the walk is longer than it looks.

The park has lit the cliffs with colored lights since 2009, and its own calendar lists 1 November as the opening of the lighting season. The hours on the site run to 21:00. In December the sun sets around 15:30, so you get a long dark evening with the quarry glowing green, blue and red against black rock, and with music in places.

This is the reason to come in winter. Dress for it, plan to be out of the wind, and decide which train you want home. The 17:00 train reaches Sortavala at 18:10 and leaves you about an hour of lights. The 18:55 steam train gets in at 20:10 and gives you two and a half hours after sunset.

A Finnish-style cafe on Lenin Street, in a house with a tower and red details just past the Karelian bridge. Travelers are sent here for the kalitki, and its menu is said to include Finnish fish soup with cream and dumplings of game and trout. That makes it the right place to finish the day: warm, and about 15 minutes on foot from the station where the retro train brings you back.

Opening hours were not checked, and the sources are from 2025, so look at it on the map before you plan the evening around it. If it is closed, Sortavala has other cafes in the center.

Sortavala's center was built by Finns. The fortress-like Leander House on the corner of Karelskaya and Gagarin streets was finished in 1905 for the Kansallis-Osake-Pankki bank to a design by Eliel Saarinen, then a little-known architect, in the style of Finnish national romanticism. Nearby stand the Bank of Finland building (Uno Ullberg, 1915) and the old lyceum (Johan Jacob Ahrenberg, 1901). The former town hall at Lenin Street 18, built in 1885, is a wooden box of carved details with a spire.

Walk it in an hour, and in summer do it in the evening, after the Meteor is back. The statue of the runo singer by Alpo Sailo, put up in 1935 for the hundredth anniversary of the Kalevala, shows the folk singer Petri Shemeikka, whom the sculptor knew. Some of the old buildings are in poor repair, which is part of the honest picture, not a reason to skip.

A small exhibition of woodcuts and carved wooden reliefs by Kronid Gogolev, a painter and sculptor from Sortavala whose panels draw on the Kalevala, village life and folklore. It is listed at 10:00 to 20:00, and it is the quiet, indoor item of the day.

If you take the 11:00 Meteor, this stop and the previous one fit before the boat only if you walk fast. Otherwise do them in the evening when you are back. The price is from a 2025 listing, so ask at the door.

Nobody knows when the monastery was founded. A legend gives a Greek monk in the tenth century, while the scholarly consensus puts it towards the end of the 14th century. Swedes attacked it and killed monks in 1578, and after another raid it lay desolate from 1611 to 1715, then was restored in the 18th century. From 1917 it stood inside independent Finland, and in 1940 about 150 monks were evacuated to Heinavesi, where the New Valamo Monastery still stands. The island then became a Soviet base, and the monastery was returned to the church in 1989. The dominant sight is the blue-domed Transfiguration Cathedral rising over the pines as the Meteor comes into the bay.

A day trip gives you about five hours: the monastery court, a gardens walk, and one or two of the hermitages (skity), such as the Nikolsky skete on its own island or the Gethsemane skete, with the Mount Eleon viewpoint. Rent an electric bike or hire a golf cart if you want to see more than the group does. Dress is conservative (long trousers for men, a skirt below the knee and a headscarf for women), cards are not accepted everywhere, and the island's only cash machine belongs to Pochtabank.

In winter it is a different day. The monastery has accepted pilgrims all year since 2021, but a 2021 report says the cold-season ship leaves from Priozersk, not Sortavala, takes 3.5 hours and runs twice a week, with a hovercraft if the lake freezes. Private operators in Sortavala sell aerosani trips (an aerosani is a propeller-driven sled), listed at 6,640 RUB for Valaam and 8,000 RUB with the skerries, though Sputnik8 marks them off season. Call the monastery's pilgrim service before you count on any of it.

A park on a hill west of the center, behind the railway line, with sculptures, a large amphitheatre and a viewpoint at the top. On the western side you can find the remains of ski-jump ramps built by the Finns between the wars. At dusk it is the best free view of Sortavala and the lake edge.

Expect a short climb on paths that may be icy, and carry a phone torch in winter.

Gustav Winter is the restaurant of the Dacha Wintera park hotel, a lake-shore resort about 8 km south of the center. A 2023 menu in T-Zh lists mushroom caviar, marinated boletes, porcini soup and a cloudberry dessert, which makes it a good place for the forest side of Karelian food.

The sources are old, so call before you taxi out and agree on the ride back. If it is shut, go to Dom Berga or any open cafe in the center.

Train 037M, a long-distance service that starts in Moscow, calls at Sortavala at 08:50 and arrives in Petrozavodsk at 14:20, a 5 hour 30 minute ride. Yandex Schedules listed it for every date from 9 November on. The way back leaves Petrozavodsk at 13:50 and reaches Sortavala at 19:29.

Bring food and a hot drink; this is a long-distance train, not a tourist one. Seat numbers are assigned at booking, so choose a window. It is also the one way across that does not depend on road conditions, which matters in a snowstorm.

Petrozavodsk was founded on 11 September 1703 by Prince Menshikov on Peter the Great's orders, as an iron foundry for cannons and anchors for the Baltic fleet. It was first Shuysky zavod, then Petrovskaya sloboda, and became a city under Catherine II in 1777. The Neoclassical center survives from that period. Lenin Square, an oval space known as the Round Square (kruglaya ploshad), dates from 1775 and was rebuilt in 1789 and 1839, and the Soviet-era Lenin still stands in the middle.

The National Museum sits in the former governor's house of the late 18th century and was founded in 1871. It covers geology, the peoples of Karelia, their costumes and the story of Kizhi, which is useful before day five. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00, with the ticket office closing at 17:30. Allow two hours; with an audio guide (500 RUB) the exhibition runs well.

A Neoclassical cathedral consecrated in 1832, and part of the Neoclassical heritage that sets Petrozavodsk apart from other northern Russian towns. Services, opening hours and photography rules were not checked, so treat it as a walk past, with a look inside if the doors are open.

The embankment along the Petrozavodsk Gulf of Lake Onega was opened in 1994 and is laid with Karelian granite and marble. It is lined with sculptures given by Petrozavodsk's sister cities from around the world, some of them extravagant and strange, and there is a birch grove where the city's first church stood in 1703. The monument to Peter I (Monighetti, bronze and granite, 1873) is nearby.

In winter it is a different place: the lake is a white plain, the wind comes straight off it, and the temperature feels 5-10 degrees lower than in the streets behind. Walk it in the late afternoon light. Sunset in mid-December is around 15:15 by the solar formula, and the ice figures that the city sets up on the embankment vary by year, so check what is there that week.

For years this was the only restaurant in Petrozavodsk that served Karelian dishes, and T-Zh still sends people here. On its 2023 menu kalitki cost from 79 RUB (potato or millet) to 370 RUB (with moose), lohikeitto (salmon in cream) comes with croutons and rieska, a small wheat flatbread, and there is porcini soup and a porcini salad.

Order the lohikeitto, a kalitka, and moose if you are curious. The menu and prices are from 2023, so confirm it is open. It is on Engels Street, a few minutes' walk from Lenin Square.

This is where Russian spa culture begins. In the winter of 1714 an ore carter named Ivan Ryaboev, who suffered from his heart, found a spring that did not freeze in the bog near Konchezero, drank from it and felt better. The story reached Admiral Apraksin and the tsar, who had ordered a search for healing waters in the manner of Europe and France, and in 1719 Peter founded the first Russian spa here. He came to take the cure four times, in 1719, 1720, 1722 and 1724. The village was called Dvortsy, Palaces, until 1965, and the name Martsialnye, the waters of Mars, honors the iron in the spring.

Peter's wooden palace has not survived, but the museum, a branch of the National Museum, shows the history in the former keeper's house of 1830, and the small wooden church of the Apostle Peter, built in 1721, stands in the grounds. Allow an hour and a half. The museum is closed on Mondays.

A sanatorium still works in the village, and the territory is a protected museum reserve, with a pavilion built in the 19th century over the former spring and another over the old ore diggings. Walk the paths, see the pavilion, and decide whether you want to stay for treatment.

Whether the sanatorium sells single procedures or a drink of the spring water to day visitors was not confirmed, so ask at the museum or call the sanatorium before you promise anyone a soak. The village has no free public toilets; the cafe charges a small fee for its own.

The name comes from the Karelian kiivas, impetuous. The Suna River drops about 10.7 m over a diabase ridge in a cascade of four steps, in a strict nature reserve founded in 1931 that protects the taiga. The flow is smaller than it used to be since a dam went up upstream, and Sputnik8 says the water does not freeze even in the coldest winters, which is what makes it a good winter stop.

The ticket also covers the dendrarium and the nature museum. The reserve is on the road north from Petrozavodsk, about 78 km from town. Winter hours listed are 08:00 to 19:00 and summer 07:00 to 23:00, but the source is a travel aggregator, so ring the reserve first. Do not climb past the fences; the rock is wet and the reserve rules ban it. Snow lies for about 143 days a year and reaches around 83 cm by the end of winter, so expect snow on the paths.

A restaurant at Karla Marksa Avenue 1A, by the river station, and in T-Zh's account the best place to eat lohikeitto in Karelia, though the writer finds it uneven. Its 2023 menu lists lohikeitto at 590 RUB, a fish soup (ukha) of cod and pink salmon at 470 RUB, whitefish from Lake Onega, a pike cutlet, and White Sea mussels. In summer it has a terrace with a view of the lake.

Order both soups and compare: the cream one is the Finnish soup, the clear one the Russian. The menu is from 2023, so check the restaurant is open before you head back from Kivach.

By the account of a Kizhi museum employee in T-Zh (June 2025) the season is June to September and February to March. Fast hydrofoils, the Kometa, leave Petrozavodsk's river station from May to October, usually daily from 9:00 to about 13:00, take from 1 hour 15 minutes and stop on the island for four hours. Winter is different: from about January to March private operators and the museum run hovercraft over the ice, with 1.5-2 hours on the island. The fare is 4,000-6,000 RUB from Petrozavodsk, and from the villages of Oyatevshchina or Velikaya Guba it is cheaper (programs from 1,800 RUB).

That leaves a gap, roughly the start of November to January, when the lake is freezing and nothing regular runs. In 2021 a state-run Mi-8 helicopter flew to Kizhi on Mondays in the cold season, at 1,190 RUB one way and with a 10 minute stop, but nothing shows that it still flies. A three-day snowmobile tour from Petrozavodsk costs from about 700 EUR (65,000 RUB, 2025). If you are traveling in the gap, do not plan day five around Kizhi.

If Kizhi is out of reach, spend the morning with sled dogs. A Sputnik8 listing offers a four hour visit to a husky kennel in the village of Matrosy, about 30 km west of Petrozavodsk, with a ride on the forest trail. Bookings close six hours before the start.

The listing does not name the operator in the text, and whether the ride runs in every kind of weather is unknown, so treat it as a lead and ask. Snowmobile safaris from Petrozavodsk are the other winter option, with prices that depend on the group; none were found for 2026/27. You are back in the city by early afternoon.

The pogost was the administrative center and parish of the old Kizhi district, and the word now means this fenced ensemble: the Church of the Transfiguration with 22 domes, the nine-domed Church of the Intercession and a bell tower, UNESCO listed since 1990. The Transfiguration church was laid down on 6 June 1714 on the site of one that lightning burned, and the names of its builders are unknown. A legend says the master used a single axe and threw it into the lake when he finished, saying there would never be another like it. The church is about 37 m tall.

Now the myth: Kizhi was built without a single nail. The log walls are joined by notches, but roughly 180,000 nails hold the 60,000 roof shingles. In summer, from 1 May, you can enter the Transfiguration church (a separate 600 RUB ticket; the museum employee says it was closed to visitors for about forty years until the restoration ended in 2020). It is an unheated summer church with no winter services, so in February you see it from outside, in snow, with the iconostasis out of reach. The heated Intercession church holds services from October to Easter.

The open-air museum began in 1951, when the restorer Aleksandr Opolovnikov brought the Oshevnev house over from the village of Oshevnevo, and it has since gathered chapels, houses, barns and windmills from villages all over the Zaonezhye. The best known visitor from outside the pogost is the Church of the Resurrection of Lazarus from the Murom Monastery, which tradition dates to the 14th century and which is usually named the oldest wooden church in Russia.

In a 1.5-2 hour winter visit, the pogost takes most of your time, but ask for the Lazarus church on the way. In summer you have four hours and can see the village houses, windmills and barns, and the Zaonezhye village.

Friends of the T-Zh food writer in Petrozavodsk praise the kalitki on Kizhi, and the museum's winter excursion advertised tea and Karelian baking on the island in 2018. No sit-down restaurant was checked, so ask the tour or the museum what is on offer that day.

The 805V Lastochka leaves Petrozavodsk at 18:05 and arrives at Saint Petersburg's Ladozhsky station at 23:29 every day except 31 December. There is also a 06:36 departure, arriving 12:00, if you would rather spend the night in Petrozavodsk and go home in the morning.

From Saint Petersburg you can fly home or add days there: see 5 Days in Saint Petersburg. Buy the ticket in advance.