Kandalaksha

Murmansk’s ice-free harbour gets all the attention, but the White Sea, three hundred kilometres south, is a different proposition. I came to Kandalaksha by train from Murmansk — the line runs inland first before curving south, passing through pine forest that becomes gradually denser as the latitude drops — and arrived at a town that had the particular atmosphere of a place that was important once and has since been allowed to be ordinary. The railway came through in 1916. The port supplied the front during the Second World War. Now it is a fishing and light-industrial town of about thirty thousand, and the bay in front of it freezes every winter, which is apparently not a problem but a feature.

The Kandalaksha Gulf Sanctuary encompasses the bay and a scatter of small islands in it, and it exists primarily to protect the common eider — a heavy, handsome sea duck that winters here in numbers that surprised me. I had expected wildlife watching to mean binoculars aimed at a distant smudge. Instead, on my first morning at the harbour, there were perhaps five hundred eiders visible from the dock, diving and surfacing in the strips of open water between the ice floes, making a sound like a crowd having multiple overlapping conversations about something that keeps surprising them. The drake eiders’ black-and-white plumage against the white ice was a composition that nobody had arranged but that seemed impossible to have happened accidentally.

The town itself sits at the bay’s edge with a directness I found appealing — no waterfront development, no attempt at tourism infrastructure, just the working town ending where the water begins. Behind the main street, wooden houses rise up a hill through birch trees, and there are a few surviving examples of the pre-Soviet wooden architecture that the north of Russia once had in abundance and has mostly lost to fire and neglect: carved window frames, ornate gable ends, the kind of craftsmanship that made winter useful by giving people something to do. I walked up through these streets on a clear afternoon when the temperature was around minus eighteen and found them almost entirely quiet except for a cat sitting very deliberately in the sunlit strip at the top of a set of steps, doing what cats do with available light.

The fish market operates a few mornings a week near the port, and this is where Kandalaksha most clearly announces its purpose. Cod, herring, White Sea navaga — a small cold-water fish with flesh so white it looks bleached — and occasionally seal, which is sold in portions next to everything else with no particular ceremony. I bought navaga from a woman who told me how to cook it with potatoes in a way I didn’t fully understand and then demonstrated with her hands, and it was good enough that I went back the following morning, where she saw me coming and began to explain something else I couldn’t quite follow.

The forests behind the town are extensive and, in winter, navigable by ski or snowshoe without encountering much that would impede you except distance. The taiga here is coniferous — spruce and Scots pine rather than the birch of the high north — and the light through the trees on clear days is amber and almost warm, even at minus twenty. It smells of resin and snow, and it is one of those smells that seems to attach itself to memory with unusual fidelity.

When to go: January through March for winter birding (eiders and long-tailed ducks in the bay) and full White Sea ice. May and June bring the spring migration and breeding season. July and August allow access to the islands of the sanctuary, which can be visited by arrangement with the reserve administration. Avoid April — slush, ice break-up, and cold temperatures that feel more dispiriting than their winter equivalents.