Lake Ladoga
The largest lake in Europe, beside Saint Petersburg
Lake Ladoga is the largest lake in Europe, a broad freshwater sea in northwestern Russia just east of Saint Petersburg. Fed by the Neva and Svir rivers and emptying through the short Neva into the Gulf of Finland, it has shaped the history of the region for a thousand years — a Viking trade route, a contested frontier, and, in the darkest winters of the Second World War, the frozen lifeline that kept a besieged city alive. Its northern reaches are rocky and island-strewn, its southern shores low and reedy.
Ladoga covers roughly 17,900 square kilometres and reaches a maximum depth of about 230 metres in its deep, fjord-like northwestern basin, while the southern part is shallow and gently shelving. Carved and dammed by glaciers, the lake is geologically young and feeds the Neva, which carries its waters past Saint Petersburg to the Baltic. Frozen over for months each winter, it can also whip up sudden, dangerous storms in its open central waters. Hundreds of islands cluster in the north, among them the wooded archipelago of Valaam.
The medieval trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks ran through Ladoga, and the monastery on Valaam has stood on its waters for centuries. During the 872-day Siege of Leningrad, the only link to the outside world ran across the lake — open water by boat in summer and, in winter, the famous Road of Life laid directly across the ice, over which trucks hauled food in and evacuees out under enemy fire. Today the lake is a fishery, a water source for millions, and a place of pilgrimage and recreation on Russia's northwestern edge.