The Most Beautiful Places in Karelia
5 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in Karelia are Solovetsky Monastery, Onega petroglyphs and Valaam Monastery. The list covers 5 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Karelia lies on the Baltic Shield, some of the oldest rock in Europe, scraped bare by ice-age glaciers that left behind tens of thousands of lakes, granite outcrops and pine forest. The two largest lakes in Europe, Ladoga and Onega, border it, and the White Sea washes its northern coast. This watery country became a refuge for monks and a heartland of the wooden architecture of the Russian North, while far older peoples carved their images into its shoreline rocks.
On the eastern shore of Lake Onega, the Onega petroglyphs show swans, boats, hunters and enigmatic figures pecked into granite several thousand years ago, part of a World Heritage Site shared with rock art on the White Sea. On the island of Kizhi in the same lake, the Church of the Transfiguration, built in 1714, crowns a tiered log structure with twenty-two wooden domes covered in aspen shingles.
Two great monasteries rose on islands. Valaam, in the north of Lake Ladoga, is an archipelago of rocky islands with a monastery whose blue domes stand among pines and coves. Solovetsky Monastery, on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, is a fortress-like complex of churches walled with giant boulders, built by monks over centuries. Finally, Ruskeala Mountain Park keeps a flooded marble quarry, its cliffs of grey and white stone above clear green water; marble from here was used in the palaces and cathedrals of St Petersburg.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Solovetsky Monastery | Monastery | ✓ |
| 2 | Onega petroglyphs | Petroglyph | |
| 3 | Valaam Monastery | Monastery | |
| 4 | Church of the Transfiguration, Kizhi | Church building | ✓ |
| 5 | Ruskeala Mountain Park | Lake |
01 Solovetsky Monastery
Russia65.024° N 35.711° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Trasprd · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the shore of the largest of the Solovetsky Islands, in the White Sea, the monastery's walls rise from the water's edge: a ring of fortifications built from enormous rounded boulders, some weighing several tonnes, stacked up to 11 metres high and 4 to 6 metres thick, punctuated by towers.
Did you know? Some of its prison cells were cramped, tapering chambers about three metres long that narrowed to around a metre at the top.
02 Onega petroglyphs
Russia61.673° N 36.029° E
SergeiBelousov · CC BY-SA 4.0 On the low rocky headlands of Lake Onega's eastern shore, just above the waterline, thousands of figures were pecked into the rock some five to six thousand years ago: swans with long necks, elk, fish, boats, people, and strange beings that are half human and half animal.
Did you know? The first scholarly article on the Besov Nos and Peri Nos images appeared in 1850, written by Pyotr Shved, a teacher at the Petrozavodsk gymnasium.
03 Valaam Monastery
Russia61.389° N 30.944° E
Пресс-служба Президента Российской Федерации · CC BY 4.0 Valaam Monastery stands on a rocky, pine-covered island in the north of Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe, with its cathedral at the centre of a square of monastic buildings and smaller hermitages, or sketes, scattered across coves and outlying islands.
Did you know? Six monks returned to the island on 13 December 1989, the feast day of Saint Andrew the First-Called.
04 Church of the Transfiguration, Kizhi
Russia62.068° N 35.224° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by sergeigussev from Pixabay The Church of the Transfiguration on Kizhi is the most famous wooden building in Russia, and one of the most astonishing anywhere: a pyramid of twenty-two domes built entirely of logs, rising 37 metres from a low grassy island in Lake Onega.
Did you know? Its log walls hold together without nails, which were used only to fix the shingles of the roofs and domes.
05 Ruskeala Mountain Park
Russia61.945° N 30.580° E
Aleksander Kaasik · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ruskeala isn't a natural lake at all — it's a flooded marble quarry, and the marble itself has a real biography. This stretch of Karelia passed from Sweden to Russia after the Great Northern War, and in 1765, under Catherine the Great, the quarry was opened to supply decorative stone for the empire's new capital.
Did you know? By 1846, after a water-powered sawmill and lime kilns were built, around 800 workers were employed at the quarries.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in Karelia?
- On our list, Solovetsky Monastery ranks first, followed by Onega petroglyphs and Valaam Monastery.
- How many domes does the Kizhi church have?
- The Church of the Transfiguration on Kizhi Island has twenty-two domes, rising in tiers above its log walls. It forms part of the Kizhi Pogost, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990.
- How old are the Onega petroglyphs?
- The petroglyphs on the eastern shore of Lake Onega are generally dated to around the fourth and third millennia BC. Together with the White Sea petroglyphs they were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021.
- What is Ruskeala marble used for?
- Marble quarried at Ruskeala from the eighteenth century onward was used in St Petersburg buildings, including St Isaac's Cathedral and the Marble Palace.
- What kinds of places are there to see in Karelia?
- In our collection, the places in Karelia are most often monasteries (2), lakes (1), churches (1) and rock art sites (1).
- How many places are on this list in Karelia?
- The list covers 5 places.