Varzuga Wooden Church

Varzuga is a village of a few hundred people on the Varzuga river near the White Sea coast of the Kola Peninsula, and the Dormition church built there in 1674 is among the finest surviving tent-roofed wooden churches in Russia - about thirty-four metres tall, built entirely of pine without nails in the northern carpentry tradition, with a steep shatyor roof and four bochka gables giving a cruciform silhouette. It was restored in the 1970s. Varzuga is a Pomor village, settled from Novgorod in the fifteenth century, and it lives on Atlantic salmon: the river is one of the best salmon rivers in Europe, fished under licence with strict catch-and-release rules on much of it, and the fishing economy is what has kept the village alive. Near it at Kuzomen is a several-square-kilometre area of moving sand, created by deforestation and overgrazing in the nineteenth century, with feral horses on it.

What you actually see

• The 1674 church - thirty-four metres of pine, tent-roofed and built without nails.
• The Pomor village - a fifteenth-century White Sea settlement still lived in.
• The salmon river - one of Europe's best, fished under licence and catch-and-release rules.
• The Kuzomen sands - a man-made desert nearby from nineteenth-century deforestation.

When to go

June to September; the road is difficult otherwise. Half a day. Salmon fishing runs to licensed seasons.

Honest expectations

Remote - a long road from Umba along the coast, rough in places. The church interior opens only when a keyholder is around. Facilities in the village are minimal. Mosquitoes in summer are severe.

Nearby

Kuzomen and its sands are downriver; the White Sea coast runs east and west.