Measuring 3555 square kilometres, Lake Peipsi forms a large stretch of Estonia’s border with Russia. Despite ranking as the fifth-biggest lake in Europe, Lake Peipsi is a low-key area of sleepy fishing settlements, thick reed beds and quiet, sandy beaches, offering little in the way of tourist facilities.

Old Believers

Many of the shoreline villages are home to members of the Russian Orthodox sect of Old Believers, who came here in the early eighteenth century to escape persecution at home and settled down to catch fish and grow onions. Renowned for their wooden houses and timber churches, Old Believer settlements like Nina, Kasepää, Varnja, and most of all Kolkja, exude an untroubled tranquillity that probably hasn’t changed much since the community first arrived.

The origins of the Old Believers – or Staroviertsii as they are known in Russian – lie in the liturgical reforms introduced into the Russian Orthodox Church by Nikon, the mid-seventeenth-century patriarch of Moscow. Priests who opposed the reforms were removed from office, but many of their congregations persisted with the old practices and were dubbed “Old Believers” by a church hierarchy eager to see them marginalized. Peter the Great was particularly keen to get rid of them and it was under his rule that groups of Old Believers moved to Lake Peipsi – and other areas on the western fringes of the empire – where they continue to practice their religion as they wish. An estimated 15,000 Old Believers still live in Estonia, most of whom remain in the Lake Peipsi region

Kolkja