Duration: 8 hours.
Group size: up to 4 people.
Good to know: once up on the lock in the village of Ozerki, you must be extremely careful and keep holding children by the hand at all times.
Guide: Mikhail.
Car: Škoda Roomster.
Phone: 8(906)217-39-69.
Pravdinsk
In Pravdinsk one of the oldest churches in the region awaits us — Friedland Church, which now houses the Orthodox Church of the Holy Great Martyr George the Victorious. We will be able to climb the bell tower by an old spiral staircase and look out over the town and its surroundings from a height of fifty metres. After the climb we will take a short walk around the town to get a closer look at its most charming little houses and turrets.
Friedland Church in Pravdinsk is older than the Cathedral on Kant Island (Kneiphof) in Kaliningrad.
There is also a hundred-year-old German hydroelectric power station here, which can optionally be visited as well.
The suspension bridge near the Pravdinsk hydroelectric station.
Zheleznodorozhny
Ancient Gerdauen, hiding behind a rather ordinary "pseudonym", has become the arena for the main efforts of the Capital Repair Fund of the Kaliningrad Region. Enough has already been done for it to be shown without embarrassment. We will stroll along the old streets that have been given a new lease of life and look into the Gramophone Museum, where they make decent coffee. The local church, the Kreishaus and the castle ruins are still waiting for caring hands to bring them back to life, but even in their present state they are well worth seeing.
The "Staraya Melnitsa" (Old Mill) café
Lunch will be waiting for us at a pleasant café on the shore of the Banktinsee (one can hardly bring oneself to call this wonderful body of water the Zheleznodorozhnaya stream).
Gerdauen Castle has seen better days.
Next to the café is the hill on which the Prussian fortress of Girdava once stood, where it all began.
The lock on the Masurian Canal in the village of Ozerki.
Ozerki
Lock No. 5 on the Masurian Canal in the village of Ozerki is a special place. For many years it was genuinely dangerous to be here. But in 2025 the lock appeared in a completely new guise. It is now an original café with an extreme sports park. Many tourists find it the most interesting place in the region.
Photos by Mikhail Ogorodnikov.
Translated from Russian with the help of AI (Claude, Anthropic), October 2026.
