The historical focus of a trip to Kobona is remembering the Road of Life. At its heart are the fishing village as an evacuation and supply port, the ice route during the blockade winter of 1941–1942, and the different perspectives on rescue and remembrance. The museum, church and story of a memorial each add their own emphasis.
The Road of Life in Kobona
During the blockade, Kobona was an important evacuation and supply port on the Road of Life. Over a period of two years, the village’s evacuation centres enabled at least one million people to leave for the mainland, saving their lives. The period covered by these two years is not specified more precisely; nevertheless, the reported figure gives a concrete sense of the scale of the evacuation.
During the blockade winter of 1941–1942, an ice route on the Road of Life ran between the village of Kobona and Cape Osinovets. This connection is also the central theme of the exhibition at the “Kobona: Road of Life” Museum. The route and its two endpoints give the historical subject a clear geographical framework: Kobona was the starting point of the ice route, and Osinovets its other end.
Museum, Church and Remembrance
The “Kobona: Road of Life” Museum opened in the village of Kobona in 1980. In the early 1990s, the “Road of Life” Museum in Kobona became a branch of the “Breakthrough of the Siege of Leningrad” Museum Reserve. If you are planning a museum visit, check the opening hours in advance; they may differ on public holidays.
The Church of St Nicholas the Wonderworker in Kobona was built in 1861. During the blockade, it provided shelter to residents of Leningrad who were being evacuated along the Road of Life. For Leningrad’s residents, the church also became a visible symbol of rescue and the Road of Life. Its history thus connects this local place with the fate of the people who reached Kobona on their evacuation journey.
In 2020, a memorial to the drivers of the Road of Life was erected next to the museum. The idea came from blockade survivors who had been evacuated via Kobona, as well as from Alexander Moiseyevich Gorodnitsky, a scientist, poet and bard, and Nikita Vladimirovich Blagovo, director of the Museum of the History of the Karl May School and vice president of the Russian Genealogical Society.
The memorial’s symbolism brings together the depiction of a legendary one-and-a-half-ton truck, a rescued boy and a notebook containing a poem to an unknown driver, written 75 years later. The boy gazes hopefully into the future through the open vehicle door. The truck’s silhouette emerges from the notebook like an image formed from memories. The memorial thus honours not only a route, but also the drivers and the people whose lives were connected with it.
Other perspectives in Leningrad Oblast
Those looking at other topics in the wider destination of Leningrad Oblast alongside Kobona will find a distinct natural and cultural perspective in the Vepsian Forest Nature Park. The park lies in the far east of the oblast and includes seven nature reserves with particularly strict protection regulations. Among its many lakes is Lake Lerinskoye, the park’s largest lake, located in the reserve of the same name. Ancient spruce and pine forests have been preserved in the “Vepsian Forest” and “Ashchozersky” reserves. They are important for numerous organisms that can survive only in forests undisturbed by economic activity.
The Veps, a small people of Russia with their own culture and traditions, have traditionally lived in the nature park. Brown bears are found there in greater numbers; the wolverine, which is extremely rare in the region, has also been recorded. Kobona and the Vepsian Forest Nature Park thus represent different topics within Leningrad Oblast: here, the memory of evacuation and the Road of Life; there, protected areas, forests, lakes and Vepsian culture.
Discover more destinations: Pobeda, Gostilizy, Myaglovo, Starosiverskaya, Ushaki, Pervomayskoye, Svetogorsk, Shapki.
For the wider travel overview: Leningrad Oblast.
