Korela Fortress

Korela was the most north-western town of medieval Rus: the fortress was laid down by the Novgorodians at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on an island of the Uzerva — a branch of the Vuoksa — to shield the republic's north-western marches from the Swedes. The fortress's Finnish name — Käkisalmi, 'cuckoo strait' — and Swedish Kexholm, 'cuckoo island': all three languages of this land are still heard in its names. Modern Priozersk grew around the stone walls. The wooden walls of 1310 perished in a fire fifty years later so fierce that the chronicle recorded: 'of the townsmen only souls remained'. In the fourteenth century Korela covered six thousand square metres — a hundred log houses and some three hundred inhabitants, living by farming, fishing and the Christian faith. In 1364, by the chronicle of Avraamka, posadnik Yakov raised a 'stone koshel' — the first stone tower; however, Kirpichnikov's excavations in the 1970s showed that the only surviving tower of the inner citadel is a Swedish structure of the second half of the sixteenth century. Then came alternation: from the 1330s Korela was ruled by the Lithuanian princes Narimunt and Patrikey; in 1580, in the Livonian War, the Swedes took the dilapidated inner fortress and rebuilt it; by the Treaty of Tyavzino of 1595 the fortress returned to Russia. In 1609 tsar Vasily Shuisky promised Korela with its district to the Swedish commander De la Gardie for help against the Time of Troubles — but the local population refused to recognise the treaty's terms and held the fortress longer than any paper said. Today the surviving premises are occupied by the 'Korela Fortress' local history museum: curtains, the powder cellar, exhibitions on the history of the Priozerye land. The visit pairs with a walk along the Vuoksa — the river here breaks into islands and channels, and the fortress stands on one of them; the water around the old walls gives the ensemble a quiet northern solemnity.