Petrozavodsk

People lived on this shore of Lake Onega some seven thousand years ago, and in the Middle Ages several lakeside villages stood on the site. On 11 September 1703 Prince Menshikov founded the settlement of Petrovskaya Sloboda at Peter the Great's command, around a new iron foundry making cannons and anchors for the Baltic Fleet in the Great Northern War. The works were renamed the Petrovsky zavod, the "Petrine factory", which gave the city its name. By 1717 it was the largest settlement in Karelia, with about 3,500 people, a timber fort and small palaces for the tsar and Menshikov.

After Peter's death the settlement emptied and the foundry closed in 1734, but in 1773 Catherine the Great founded a new one, the Alexandrovsky works, to make cannons for the wars with the Ottoman Empire; Charles Gascoigne modernised it in 1787–1796. In 1777 the settlement became a town named Petrozavodsk, a neoclassical centre was built around the new Round Square, and in 1784 it became the regional capital in place of Olonets.

Under Soviet rule the population grew more than fourteenfold, from about 19,800 in 1918 to 283,000 in 1991. Finnish forces occupied the city from 1941 to 1944, calling it Äänislinna, and opened concentration camps there, eleven of them by the time the city was retaken. From 1940 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1956 it was the capital of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic. In 2015 the city was named a City of Military Glory.

Petrozavodsk stands out among the towns of northern Russia for its neoclassical architecture, from the Round Square to the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, and for the statues of Peter the Great, the poet Gavrila Derzhavin, who governed Olonets in the 18th century, and Alexander Nevsky. The city's Finnish, Karelian and Vepsian name is Petroskoi. The National Theatre's Karelian and Vepsian productions reflect the republic's Finnic peoples.

Cultural life reflects that mix. The National Theatre of Karelia, founded in 1932, is the only Finnish-language theatre in Russia and the main stage for plays in Karelian and Vepsian, and the city also has the Karelia Philharmonic, founded in 1933, the Karelian Musical Theatre of 1955 and the National Library of Karelia. The Kizhi museum reserve, whose island churches are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, has exhibition halls in the city.

The lake shapes local identity: the embankment, inaugurated in 1994 and lined with sculptures given by twin cities around the world, is the city's showpiece, and the Shoksha quarries nearby supplied the red quartzite used in St Isaac's Cathedral and Lenin's Mausoleum.

About 281,000 people lived in Petrozavodsk in 2022, making it the capital and largest city of the Republic of Karelia. The city stretches along Petrozavodsk Bay on a series of lake terraces, ringed by forest on the south-west, and is counted among the greenest medium-sized cities in Russia.

The city is officially classed as equivalent to the Far North. Petrozavodsk State University and the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, one of the largest research centres in north-western Russia, make it the republic's centre of learning, and quarries around the city produce stone and road aggregates. Much of the population lives in large residential districts, the biggest being Drevlyanka, with about 60,000 people, and Kukkovka, with about 50,000.

Buses link the outer districts of Drevlyanka, Kukkovka and Sulazhgora with the centre, and new trolleybuses have been bought since 2022 for a network that has run since 1961.

Karelia's signature is the kalitka, or Karelian pasty: a thin open crust of rye filled with rice, barley porridge or mashed potato and spread, while hot, with butter, often mixed with chopped boiled egg. The pasties are also eaten throughout Finland, and have had traditional speciality guaranteed status in Europe since 2003. The oldest pasties had rye crusts filled with barley; potato and then buckwheat arrived as fillings in the 19th century, and rice later.

Lake Onega and the surrounding waters supply the other staples. Karelian dining often features fish cooked whole in its own soup, and the forests that ring the city are part of a large green zone.

The Russian classics are everywhere too — shchi, pelmeni dumplings, kasha and blini, zakuski of pickled cucumbers, herring and black bread, kvass in summer and strong tea with jam. Most restaurants and cafés are in the centre, between Lenin Square, Karl Marx Avenue and the lake.