Brutal and intricate stone reliefs.
The solid but slowly wasting beauty of Old Ladoga gives us one of our best glimpses of Russia's cultural foundation stones.
As Russia looks with trepidation towards the uncertain future, St Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum has opened a window on the region's distant and often brutally primitive past.
Three rooms in the bottom level of the Hermitage (you need to turn right from the box office) have been filled with the belongings of the tribes that lived in Northwestern Russia from the stone and iron periods to the beginning of the 16th century.
Almost 600 often fragile and frayed pieces of history evoke the harsh and mostly rough echoes of a life long gone from this section of the earth.
Pottery shards and fragments plus the occasional almost whole piece, arrow heads, ancient knives and other hunting and fishing implements used by the Baltic, Slav and Viking tribes who once inhabited the area.
Alongside these more down-to-earth items are a surprisingly bright and eye-catching array of jewelry, sculptured forms and other ornamental creations.
Splashes of color from necklaces of brightly tinted stones and crystals and intricately worked stone, metal and wood sing with a vibrant zest for beauty beyond the day-to-day drudgery of subsistence living.
Likewise, a 1,000-year-old-ski, a shrivelled but unmistakeably fashionable woman's shoe, and a piece from an ornate comb offer other touchstones to the multi-faceted texture of a barely-remembered culture.
A color video (in Russian) of Old Ladoga places the exhibition in better context by allowing museum visitors to see the sort of town that was once the center of these peoples' world.
Old Ladoga -- mentioned as one of the 10 largest Russian towns in the ancient Russian Primary Chronicle of 862 -- lay on the old "Vikings Road," the main trade route linking Scandinavia with the Middle East and with eastern Europe.
The film centers on this still-visible thoroughfare, which the narrator calls "Probably the most ancient road in the world."
The road is believed to still run along the same route through the Ladoga region as it did 1,000 years ago, though the once-busy highway is hardly-used and a mere 1,000 people currently live along it.
Researchers have dug down about 5 meters (17 feet) through different cultural layers along this road and found Arab silver coins and decorations made of carnelian (a reddish variety of chalcedony) in addition to large numbers of Scandinavian artifacts.
Many nations shared this region in ancient times -- local Slav and Baltic tribes, Scandinavians, Finns and Arabs.
Scandinavians lived in Ladoga from its foundation as warriors, merchants and craftsmen, and many Scandinavian items are displayed at the exhibition -- decorations, combs, weapons.
Old Ladoga, now a small town about 100 kilometers (62 miles) east of St Petersburg, marked Russia's northern border for approximately 10 centuries.
Many historians have linked Old Ladoga with Rurik of Jutland, the putative founder of the Kingdom of Novgorod.
"Let us seek a prince who may rule over us, and judge us according to the Law," decided the tribes, tired of war in the frozen north and seeking peace and order, the Primary Chronicle states.
To solve this problem, the Rus people of the Novgorod region invited a Viking chieftain, Rurik, to rule them. Rurik responded to the invitation with alacrity and arranged the warring tribes into the Novgorod kingdom.
At one point early in the kingdom's history Rurik chose Old Ladoga for his capital, though the seat of power soon moved to Novgorod itself.
Controversy still rages among historians of the period as to how a Viking became the ruler of the Eastern Slavic areas; some question whether Rurik even existed or if he was a myth adopted from the Kiev Rus, but the Rurikovichi dynasty, which ruled Russia until the end of the 16th century, is believed to have been founded in Old Ladoga.
With its two surviving cathedrals, the remains of three churches and a fortress, plus the burial mounds around the town, Old Ladoga is considered a unique monument to the times when the Russian State was struggling to be born.
Labelling of the exhibits is in English as well as Russian, though unfortunately that doesn't extend to wall-mounted panels explaining (in Russian only) the history of the region and the dig that uncovered the items displayed.
Brutal and intricate stone reliefs.