Varzuga Village

Varzuga is one of the oldest Russian settlements of the Kola North: a charter of 1466 records how the Varzuga man Timofey Yermolinich granted the Solovetsky monastery fishing grounds on the Varzuga river. The village stands on both banks, 22 kilometres from the river's mouth on the White Sea; fewer than three hundred people live here today. Its pearl is the wooden tent-roofed Dormition church of 1674, built, according to tradition, 'without a single nail'. Its iconostasis of 84 icons was consecrated in 1677, and its painted 'heaven' ceiling is the only one surviving in Murmansk Oblast. A textbook example of Russian tent-roof architecture, it was restored in 1973 and returned to the church in 1996. Varzuga is a historic centre of salmon fishing: the river is famed for its sea-run salmon, and the collective farm still runs commercial fishing and angling tourism (including helicopter drop-offs to camps on the Varzuga, Umba and Kitsa rivers). The Tersky Coast with its sandy beaches and dunes is a separate, almost Mediterranean page of the North.