Lake Seliger

Lake Seliger spreads through the Valdai Hills as a network of long reaches, bays and wooded islands. Its outlet, the Selizharovka, flows to the upper Volga, while a portage near Berezovets linked the lake to the rivers leading toward Novgorod. Fish sustained the settlements on its shores, and the lake also offered a route between river basins.

On Stolobny Island the hermit Nil lived and died in the sixteenth century. A monastery later grew around his resting place, becoming the Nilov Hermitage. The island and surrounding waters belonged in the sixteenth century to the boyar Bogdan Belsky and in the early seventeenth to Boris Lykov. At the southern end of the lake, the inhabitants of Ostashkov defended their fishing rights: outsiders who wished to fish the town’s waters had to pay the townspeople. Monks, fishermen and traders all left their mark on Seliger’s indented shores.