🇷🇺 A highland that reveals itself gradually

A place where mountains and light work almost like artists — the Lago-Naki Plateau in the Western Caucasus.

Lago-Naki lies on the border of Krasnodar Krai and Adygea, in the ridges of the Western Caucasus, at an altitude of roughly 1,800–2,200 metres above sea level. It is a vast karst plateau covering more than 800 square kilometres: soft waves of upland, cliffs, valleys, sinkholes and hundreds of caves, among them the famous Bolshaya Azishskaya Cave.

📍 On the way here, you first see ordinary forested mountain slopes; then the road winds a few times, and suddenly the forest ends, and a broad, luminous expanse opens up ahead — alpine meadows. There are no sharp, jagged peaks here: instead, there are long, smooth mountain backs blanketed with grass, over which light and wind travel.

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❤️From Russia with love

🦢 In Russia there is a famous fairy tale by Alexander Pushkin, "The Tale of Tsar Saltan". The poet took a folk tale as a basis, transformed it and added a great many new details. The work tells of a tsar who marries the youngest of three sisters, and the envious relatives deceitfully send the young tsarina with her baby in a barrel into the open sea. But the son of Tsar Saltan, Prince Gvidon, miraculously escapes, grows up on a deserted island and, with the help of magic, restores justice.

🩷 Pushkin loved this tale dearly and wrote it in just a few weeks in the autumn of 1831, and then himself turned it into verse, although he initially wanted simply to retell it in prose. And it immediately became a favourite in Russia — nearly all children know it by heart.

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🌸 Patriarch's Ponds is a famous historic district in the very heart of Moscow. It got its name in the 17th century, when Patriarch Joachim ordered three ponds to be dug for fish farming for the patriarchal table. After the fire of 1812, two of the ponds were filled in, leaving only one, which was eventually improved and a public garden was laid out around it.

📚 Today it is a cult location, known from Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, where its action begins. Around the single pond lies a cosy public garden with lime-tree alleys, and in the centre stands a monument to the fabulist Ivan Krylov.

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❤️From Russia with love

🇷🇺 Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR for almost 30 years, from 1957 to 1985. His record includes participation in the preparation of the Tehran, Yalta and Potsdam conferences, the settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the signing of the nuclear non-proliferation treaties. He considered his main achievements to be the creation of the UN, the consolidation of post-war borders in Europe and the recognition of the USSR as a great power. His life credo was the phrase:

"Ten years of negotiations are better than a single day of war".

🛠 For his principled stance and intransigence at the negotiating table, Gromyko was nicknamed "Mr No" in the West. Western journalists noted him as a skilled dialectician, yet considered him excessively tough because of his frequent use of the veto. However, historians emphasise that Soviet foreign policy under his leadership was constructive and inclined to compromise. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called him "one of the most capable diplomats I have ever had to deal with". Such was the great diplomat that the Soviet school of diplomacy produced.

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🇷🇺 A strip between two seas

On the White Sea there is a shore that manages to be at once almost monochrome and incredibly picturesque — the Tersky Coast in the southeast of the Kola Peninsula.

The Tersky Coast stretches along the south‑eastern tip of the Kola Peninsula, from the mouth of the Varzuga River to Cape Svyatoy Nos. On one side lies the White Sea; on the other, just to the north, already the Barents Sea: a region where the cold waters of two seas meet within a mere few dozen kilometres.

The shore here is predominantly low and gently sloping, rocky in places; the coastal uplands are modest and rise gradually towards the interior of the continent. Sand spits, shingle and flat granite slabs that descend into the water in long steps create the feeling of a «long‑drawn‑out» shore — not abrupt, but soft, yet at the same time very open to the wind.

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❤️From Russia with love

☺️ Morozko (Father Frost) is a mighty winter spirit from Russian folk tales. He appears to people as a grey-haired old man in a warm fur coat, roaming the forests and fields, freezing rivers and painting the windows with frosty patterns. In the famous tale of the same name, he tests the soul of a girl left in the winter forest, rewarding her for her patience and kind heart, while he harshly punishes her wicked and proud sister.

🤩 This story teaches that even in the bitterest frost, sincere kindness and humility warm better than any stove. Morozko acts as a righteous judge, giving to each according to their deeds. His image reminds us that inner beauty is valued above outward glitter and wealth.

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❤️From Russia with love