Megrega is an old village ("selo"), which has become the southern outpost or a satellite of the town of Olonets. This is the first settlement after the southern turn from the highway to Olonets. So, Megrega is like a guard of Olonija, each time letting in a casual visitor to Olonets. Namely here “sloboda” (outskirts of a town) starts, spreading along down Megrega river and bringing a traveler to the town. Megrega has an unusual place among other slobodas. It meets the guests with the sight of a cemetery and a small wooden church of Frol and Lavr, XVII century and a small river with a bridge in the middle of the village.
The main sights of Megrega – the church of Frol and Lavr with the cemetery seems to be not associated with the village at all. Poorly informed travelers race through the village and do not note it, or if they even know about the church, they perceive it as existing separately from the village. That is why Megrega, a big village with a tumbledown and decapitated stone church and a road winding through the village and along the river, on the one hand, and the cemetery with the small church and few parishioners who can hardly be met in the village itself, on the other hand, are perceived separately.
The residents of Megrega are known to wish to be city-dwellers. Many of them often go to Olonets, which has become a part of their native village. To put it more precisely, Megrega has become nothing more than a remote part of Olonets. That is why it is even more astonishing that at the same time it is still an ordinary big Karelian village.
Megrega is a crucial point. From this place a road goes to the east, little by little taking you uphill, to the woods and small mounts. The road to the west directly leads to Ladoga, across almost Middle Russian fields and meadows of Olonetskaya lowland. Megrega is the first point of unique Olonetskaya Karelia. Favourable climatic conditions are combined with by extremely good location of the lowland formed among forested selgas (selga means lake) where Megrega river falls into Olonka river.
This region is a kind of famous meadow ring of Prisykhona, where long since developing diary farming produces a widely known brand of Vologodskoye butter. Both among thick forests of Vologodchina (Vologda region) one can suddenly discover the upper Sukhona river, all in meadows, and the space is as if gets bigger here, among Karelian selgas, pineries and lambushkas (a small forest lake). It becomes vast and stretched, with big meadows and fields, forests growing higher on the slopes of spurs of Olonets Hills. One can rarely see the lakes, and the rivers get deeper. So the people become more open minded, reticence of Karelian people starts disappearing. One can meet big villages with giant two-storied loghouses, the style of which has remained the same in the modern buildings.
