Kondpoga

Kondpoga stood beside Lake Onega, where the parish church and its burial ground occupied a rocky promontory. The Dormition Church is recorded in a survey of 1563, serving a community far from the parish centre at Shuya. Warfare repeatedly interrupted its life: Swedish forces burned an early church in the 1580s, a replacement stood by 1585, and another destruction followed in the early seventeenth century. A further church appears in descriptions of 1616–1619.

In 1774 local parishioners built the tall wooden Dormition Church that dominated the lakeside settlement. Its square log structure rose into an octagon and a tent-shaped roof, reaching about forty-two metres. Beneath the church site, burials spanning the medieval and early modern centuries preserve another continuity. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century graves contained devotional objects, while later burials used birch-bark wrappings, hollowed logs and plank coffins. The promontory remained a focus of worship and remembrance through successive buildings, wars and generations.