Lake Ladoga

• 1. Introduction

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  Lake Ladoga is the largest lake located entirely in Europe, and you may never have heard its name. It sits in northwestern Russia, split between the Republic of Karelia and Leningrad Oblast, near Saint Petersburg. After Lake Baikal, it is the second largest lake in all of Russia, and the 14th largest lake by area in the world. In size, it compares to Lake Ontario. Its reach extends beyond Earth. A methane lake on Saturn's moon Titan, called Ladoga Lacus, carries its name. How did a body of water with so many islands and so many names come to be? What did people fight over here for centuries, and why did supplies once cross its winter ice to save a besieged city? The answers begin with a question of language itself.

• 2. A Name Borrowed And Reshaped

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  In one of Nestor's chronicles from the 12th century, a lake appears under the name "the Great Nevo." That name links clearly to the Neva River, and possibly further to the Finnish nevo, meaning sea, or neva, meaning bog or quagmire. The lake's modern name traveled a stranger path. Ancient Norse sagas and Hanseatic treaties both mention a city of lakes named in Old Norse as Aldeigja or Aldoga. From the beginning of the 14th century, this name was commonly known as Ladoga.

  According to T. N. Jackson, it can be taken almost for granted that the name first referred to a river, then a city, and only then the lake. He traces the primary hydronym Ladoga to an inflow on the lower Volkhov River, whose early Finnic name was Alodejoki, meaning river of the lowlands. The Germanic form Aldeigja or Aldoga was then borrowed by the Slavic population. Through an Old East Slavic metathesis, ald- shifted to lad-, producing Ладога.

  Archaeology supports the Old Norse step between Finnish and Old East Slavic. The Scandinavians first appeared in Ladoga in the early 750s, a couple of decades before the Slavs. Competing ideas exist. Some derive the name from aalto, meaning wave, or the Russian dialect word алодь, meaning open lake. Eugene Helimski instead proposes a Germanic etymology, with a primary name Aldauga, meaning old source, set against the Neva as the new. That contrast between old water and new water echoes a deeper truth, because the Neva itself is geologically young.

• 3. Built By Ice

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  Geologically, the Lake Ladoga depression is a graben and syncline structure of Proterozoic age, from the Precambrian. Known as the Ladoga-Pasha structure, it hosts Jotnian sediments. During the Pleistocene glaciations, glacial overdeepening partially stripped the depression of its sedimentary rock fill. Around 130-115,000 years ago, during the Last Interglacial, the lake formed part of a marine channel between the Baltic and White Seas.

  During the Last Glacial Maximum, about 17,000 years before present, the depression likely funneled ice from the Fennoscandian Ice Sheet into a stream that fed glacier lobes further east. Deglaciation following the Weichselian glaciation reached the basin between 12,500 and 11,500 radiocarbon years before present. Ladoga began as part of the Baltic Ice Lake, a freshwater stage that stood 70-80 meters above present sea level.

  At 9,500 before present, Lake Onega, which had drained into the White Sea, started emptying into Ladoga through the River Svir. Between 9,500 and 9,100 before present, during the transgression of Ancylus Lake, Ladoga became part of that freshwater stage of the Baltic. Around 8,800 before present, a later regression left Ladoga isolated. Around 5,000 before present, waters of the Saimaa Lake broke through Salpausselkä and formed a new outlet, the River Vuoksi, raising the lake's level by 1-2 meters.

  The River Neva is the youngest piece of this story. It originated when Ladoga's waters finally broke through the threshold at Porogi into the lower Izhora River, between 4,000 and 2,000 before present. Dating of sediments in the lake's northwestern part suggests this happened at 3,100 radiocarbon years before present, or 3,410-3,250 calendar years before present.

• 4. Islands, Inflows, And Scale

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  The lake covers an average surface area of 17,891 square kilometers, excluding its islands, making it slightly larger than Kuwait. From north to south it runs 219 kilometers, with an average width of 83 kilometers. Its average depth is 47 meters, though it plunges to a maximum of 230 meters in the northwestern part. The basin spans 276,000 square kilometers, and the lake holds a volume of 837 cubic kilometers, earlier estimated at 908. On average, Ladoga stands 5 meters above sea level.

  Around 660 islands dot the water, with a combined area of about 435 square kilometers. Most cluster in the northwest, including the famous Valaam archipelago, Kilpola, and Konevets. The Karelian Isthmus separates the lake from the Baltic Sea, and Ladoga drains into the Gulf of Finland through the Neva River.

  The lake's basin gathers water from an immense network. It includes about 50,000 lakes and 3,500 rivers longer than 10 kilometers. About 85 percent of the inflow comes from tributaries, 13 percent from precipitation, and 2 percent from underground waters. The Svir River arrives from Lake Onega with a discharge of 790 cubic meters per second, the strongest of the named tributaries. The Volkhov River flows in from Lake Ilmen, and the Vuoksi River, joined by the Burnaya, comes from Lake Saimaa in Finland. Ladoga is navigable as part of the Volga-Baltic Waterway, with the Ladoga Canal bypassing the lake in the south to spare ships its open expanse.

• 5. The Living Lake

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  Forty-eight forms of fish, counting species and infra-specific taxa, have been found in Ladoga. They include roach, carp bream, zander, European perch, ruffe, an endemic variety of smelt, and eight varieties of Coregonus lavaretus. Rarely, the endangered Atlantic sturgeon appears, once confused with the European sea sturgeon. The lake also holds its own endemic ringed seal subspecies, the Ladoga seal, and a population of Arctic char genetically close to the chars of Lake Sommen and Lake Vättern in southern Sweden.

  Commercial fishing was once a major industry, then overfishing wounded it. Between 1945 and 1954, the total annual catch climbed to a maximum of 4,900 tonnes. Unbalanced fishery then drove a sharp decline from 1955 to 1963, sometimes falling to 1,600 tonnes per year. Trawling has been forbidden on the lake since 1956, and the situation gradually recovered. Between 1971 and 1990, the catch ranged from 4,900 to 6,900 tonnes per year, near the level recorded in 1938.

  Since the beginning of the 1960s, Ladoga has become considerably eutrophicated. Protection has a foothold here. The Nizhnesvirsky Natural Reserve sits along the shore immediately north of the mouth of the River Svir, where the lake's most powerful tributary enters.

• 6. Frontier Of Empires

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  In the Middle Ages, the lake formed a vital part of the trade route from the Varangians to the Eastern Roman Empire. The Norse emporium at Staraya Ladoga had defended the mouth of the Volkhov since the 8th century. During the Swedish-Novgorodian Wars, the area was disputed between the Novgorod Republic and Sweden. In the early 14th century, the fortresses of Korela, known as Kexholm, and Oreshek, known as Nöteborg, were established along the banks.

  The Russo-Swedish War of 1656-1658 brought armed vessels onto the water. The Swedes deployed several ships called Lodja against the Russians, though no large sea battles were fought. During the Ingrian War, Sweden occupied a fraction of the Ladoga coast. By the Treaty of Stolbovo in 1617, Russia ceded the northern and western coast to Sweden. In 1721, after the Great Northern War, the Treaty of Nystad returned it to Russia.

  From around 1812 to 1940, the lake was shared between Finland and Russia. The 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty severely restricted militarization, yet both Soviet Russia and Finland kept flotillas on Ladoga. After the Winter War of 1939-40, the Moscow Peace Treaty made the lake an internal basin of the Soviet Union. Following World War II, Finland lost the Karelia region again, and all Finnish citizens were evacuated from the ceded territory. The northern shore, Ladoga Karelia with the town of Sortavala, is now part of the Republic of Karelia, while the western Karelian Isthmus became part of Leningrad Oblast.

• 7. Road Of Life

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  During much of the Siege of Leningrad, from 1941 to 1944, Lake Ladoga offered the only access to the besieged city. A section of the eastern shore stayed in Soviet hands, and that foothold became a lifeline. In winter, trucks carried supplies across roads laid over the ice. In summer, boats made the crossing. People called this route the Road of Life.

  World War II turned the lake into a crowded battleground of navies. Not only Finnish and Soviet vessels operated there, but German and Italian ones too. The water that armies fought over had once carried the saintly and the contemplative. The ancient Valaam Monastery was founded on the island of Valaam, the largest in the lake. It was abandoned between 1611 and 1715, restored in the 18th century, and evacuated to Finland during the Winter War in 1940.

  Monastic life on Valaam resumed in 1989. Other cloisters stand nearby. The Konevets Monastery sits on Konevets island, and the Alexander-Svirsky Monastery preserves samples of medieval Muscovite architecture. The Ladoga Canal, built in the 18th century to bypass a lake prone to winds and storms that had destroyed hundreds of cargo ships, still threads the southern shore as a quieter answer to the same old danger.