Reka Sheksna

The Sheksna rises from the south-eastern corner of Lake Beloye, swings south and then east, and reaches the northern arm of the Rybinsk Reservoir near Cherepovets, making it a left tributary of the Volga. Its basin, some 19,000 square kilometres of low ridges, glacial lakes and peat bogs, drains a huge swathe of western and north-western Vologda Oblast. The name is uncertain but may come from a Finnic word for 'woodpecker', a reminder of the forested marshland the river has flowed through since long before Russian towns lined its banks.↗↗

Twentieth-century dams rewrote the river. Before them the Sheksna ran roughly 395–400 kilometres to a mouth at Rybinsk; between 1935 and 1947 the Rybinsk Reservoir drowned its lower reach, and in 1963–64 the 1,100-metre Sheksna Dam, with its pair of locks, backed water up the valley to form the Sheksna Reservoir. Most of the old channel now lies under a wide, placid sheet of water, and the only genuinely natural stretch left is the reach below the dam between the settlement of Sheksna and the city of Cherepovets.↗↗

In the upper valley the flooding has left one of the waterway's most haunting sights: the village of Krokhino is gone, and only its old Nativity Church still stands, rising out of the reservoir and slowly decaying, a monument to the settlements submerged when the impoundment was created.↗↗