Kolatselga is a center of rural administration, consolidating small villages around big lake Tulmozero. Only when one is here he starts realizing that everything what seemed typically Karelian yields to Kolatselga in this respect.
Kolatselga is notable for predominance of rivers over lakes, rocks over simply forested selga, nature in general over villages and people. Kolatselga is a wild place; correspondingly its beauty is wild unlike Vedlozero or Olonets land. Here you can see not ordinary lakes but rather floods of rapid rivers.
Many of existing villages were established in 1957-1967 and were formed of several khutors. Small villages are located along the road; the houses standing in one row along the highway alternate with forest and rivers, and there are some houses of the same village on the hill.
The problem is that all villages are similar to the most remote and deserted villages of neighborhood. Here there are streets with northern large old houses. However the houses are mainly nailed up.
Either nobody lives here, or people come here sometimes in summer. Today’s Kolatselga is a remote god-forsaken corner of nature, preserving its virgin beauty regardless whether people live here or not. The civilization breaks in this world just in one place. Three kilometers to the north from Kolatselga there are stone and brick walls of buildings referred to Peter the Great epoch. – several buildings, one of which is very big.
There was the old Tulmozero ironworks operating in XVIII – XIX and closed down later. Opposite the ironworks, on the other bank of river Kolas (you can get here from the eastern end of the village, passing the cemetery) there are mines which were used for ironworks operation: ground is pocked with passages and holes; where the galleries are ruined there are deep narrow canyons. So Kolatselga combines modern doom and glorious past. Wild nature breaks in modern villages, invading deserted houses and factories and creating this amazing beautiful land, which impresses by its originality, savagery and peace.
