Lake Onega

Lake Onega is the second largest lake in Europe.:

The area is about 9720 km2 without islands and 9890 km2 with islands.
The length from north to south is 248 km.
The average width is 50 km.
The maximum width is 96 km.
The average depth is 30 m.
The maximum depth is 120 m.
The volume of water is about 295 km3.
The height above sea level is 33 m.
The coastline is 1,810 km long.

The locals still call him by his ancient name Onego, but they can hardly explain why. Scientists say that the name came from the Finnish or Sami languages and can mean a sounding lake, large, significant, or simply sand and a low–lying plain.

Onego is amazing, fickle, contradictory. The inaccessible cliffs of its shores turn into wonderfully beautiful sandy beaches and immediately turn back into stone.

The depth of the lake in some places reaches more than a hundred meters. But at the same time, it is dotted with numerous ludas (shallow rocky shoals), and in the south there are also selgues (deep–sea bottom rises).

You can't think of a better bottom relief for a fish. It's amazing how previous generations of fishermen navigated, without any equipment, finding the habitats of their prey. Moreover, the water in Onego is dark and opaque.

From a bird's-eye view, you can see how, with low rounded shores in the south and in the north, Lake Onega cuts deeply and persistently, like needles, into the land, as if it wants to win back more space for itself. Because of this, numerous "hollows" alternate with peninsulas here, forming entire worlds – separate and self-sufficient.

The largest peninsula, Zaonezhsky, used to give its name to an entire area in the past. Zaonezhye still unites the famous islands of the Kizhi skerries, as well as the villages of Velikaya Guba and Shunga, where noisy fairs have not subsided for many centuries in a row.

There are three cities along its shores – Petrozavodsk, Kondopoga and Medvezhegorsk, and each of them is the cause of the deplorable state of the lake's ecosystem.

In 2016, Medvezhegorsk was all over the news: there was an epidemic of dysentery here due to sewage that drains directly into the Kumsu River very close to where it flows into Lake Onega. This has been happening for decades, and for local residents it is a given, a fact known to everyone since childhood.

More than a thousand watercourses flow into it, of which 60 are rivers with a long length of more than 10 km. The only river that flows out of the lake is the Svir.

But just tens of kilometers from the cities along the shores of It, there is still pure white sand scorched by the sun - the same as on the beaches of distant paradisiacal islands. So it's still fixable.