Oreshek Fortress

Oreshek stands on Orekhovy island where the Neva flows out of Lake Ladoga — a strategic point controlled by everyone who needed a road deep into Rus. The founding of the fortress in 1323 was the answer to a worsening situation on the north-western marches of the Novgorod land: the Swedes, completing their annexation of the Finnish lands, had raised the mighty castle of Vyborg in 1293, reaching right up to the Novgorod possessions and threatening 'the route from the Varangians to the Greeks'. The building answer was led by the Novgorod prince Yuri Danilovich, grandson of Alexander Nevsky. And in that very year 1323 the Orekhovets peace was concluded on the island — the first treaty in history between the Novgorod Republic and the Kingdom of Sweden, ending thirty years of hostilities: the western part of the Karelian Isthmus and the Savolaks land went to the Swedes, the eastern part with Korela stayed with Novgorod. A state border was officially established for the first time — from the Gulf of Finland along the Sestra river, to lake Saima and onward to the shore of the Kayan sea. The treaty was signed for Novgorod by prince Yuri Danilovich, posadnik Alforomey and tysiatsky Avram. Then came six centuries of alternation. From 1612 to 1702 the fortress belonged to Sweden and was called Nöteborg; Peter the Great won it back in the Great Northern War. Later the island became an infamous political prison. In 1990 Oreshek was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the 'Historic Centre of Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments'; since 1965 the fortress has been a branch of the State Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg, a monument of Russian defensive architecture of the fourteenth to twentieth centuries. A ferry runs to the island from Shlisselburg — five minutes across the Neva, but the crossing feels like a passage into another time. Inspect the towers and the citadel, the gallery walks and the prison blocks; from the high walls you see Ladoga, the start of the Neva and all of Shlisselburg. The wind here is constant: a jacket is needed even in July.