Cultural Landscape of Kenozero Lake
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How it came to be
Lake Kenozero lies in Arkhangelsk Oblast in north-western Russia, and the cultural landscape around it took shape from the 12th century as Slavic settlers gradually moved in. The meeting of the Finno-Ugric forest culture and the Slavic field culture produced a way of life in which village communities managed farmland and nature together.
Between the 14th and 17th centuries several monasteries were founded here, and the villages built wooden churches and chapels, water mills and crosses. Church ceilings were fitted with painted panels known as 'heavens', with Christ at the centre, a form found only in the Russian North. The late 18th-century Porzhensky Pogost encloses the church of St George and its bell tower within a wooden wall with gates and towers.
After the Second World War the Russian North lost much of its population, and many villages were abandoned. On 28 December 1991, at the urging of Yelena Shatkovskaya, Kenozero National Park was created over 139,663 hectares, and its historic buildings were handed to the park and partly restored. It became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 2004, and its cultural landscape was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2024.
Data: Wikidata (CC0). Photos: Wikimedia Commons, under each photo’s license. Prototype; may contain errors. We measure usage anonymously to improve the app (PostHog, EU).