Kargopol Old Town

Kargopol was a salt and fur town on the Onega, wealthy enough in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to build in stone, which is unusual this far north where almost everything was timber - a dozen white churches survive around two squares and along the river, several with carved decorative bands, and the Nativity cathedral of the 1550s is the oldest. The town declined when trade routes shifted and was never rebuilt, so the scale and the street pattern are largely eighteenth-century. Its other tradition is the Kargopol toy: small clay figures - women with birds, bearded men, half-horse half-man Polkan figures - hand-modelled and painted in a limited palette, made in villages around the town, nearly extinct by the mid-twentieth century and revived through the work of Ulyana Babkina, who kept making them alone into the 1970s. Workshops in the town continue it. Kenozero national park is south-east.

What you actually see

• The stone churches - about a dozen white buildings, unusual this far north.
• The Kargopol toy - clay figures revived from near-extinction through one maker's persistence.
• The 1550s cathedral - the Nativity, the oldest of the group.
• The unrebuilt town - an eighteenth-century scale kept by economic decline.

When to go

June to September. A day. Access is a bus from Nyandoma on the Arkhangelsk railway, or a long drive.

Honest expectations

Remote, with limited transport and few facilities. Several churches are closed or ruinous. The toy workshops keep irregular hours. Winters are long and most visitor infrastructure shuts.

Nearby

Kenozero national park is south-east; Arkhangelsk is far north.