To visit the Church of the Devil, you can travel far to San Francisco to meet the followers of the hedonistic Anton Szandor LaVey, or you can visit the surroundings of the Karelian village of Kurkiyoki, located in what was once Finnish Karelia. There you will find a small yet fascinating rocky ridge, featuring what could be described as either a cave, a grotto, or a naturally formed crevice, known as Pirunkirkko, which translates from Finnish as "Devil's Church." This is a complex of massive stone blocks that have separated from the main rock formation, creating a magnificent and unusual natural ensemble for the area.

Part of this conglomerate forms a small cave covered by a large stone, while the other part resembles a miniature mountain gorge, where, if you look up, you can see the sky. Each "room" is accessed through a small passage, but it is also possible to descend into the "gorge" from above.

Information about the Devil’s Church is more than scarce: there are no reliable records of any local cults or legendary Sami (Lappish) traditions, nor are there any frightening legends. It is only known that in the Middle Ages, Orthodox Karelians hid in these rocks from Swedish invaders.

To understand why this place is called the Devil’s Church, one must turn to our northern toponymy, which includes a whole class of sites associated with "devilish" symbolism. These are usually small but bottomless forest lakes, remote wilderness areas and syuzema (deep forest places), swamps and boggy wastelands, serpent-infested spots, deep pools, pits filled with water—bochagi—ravines, and so on. It is believed that far from human dwellings, evil spirits live here—devils or leshies, the forest lords. Thus, these places are ontologically the opposite of the human world and humanized space. Here, one might encounter paranormal phenomena widely represented in local legends: the cursed spot Devil’s Gate—"There a drowned man was pushed off the shore, and since then people have drowned there. The place lures you, you can get lost; if you turn your clothes inside out, you'll find your way out. The leshy is the master there."; the river Chertovitsa—"There a white woman would walk."; the area called Devil’s Thicket—"There was something that scared and led people astray," and so on.

In addition to being a source of metaphysical danger, the Devil in folklore can also act as a demiurge, creating landscapes in his own way—landscapes negative to humans because such terrain, made by unclean forces, is unsuitable for agriculture: these are piles of debris, pits, mounds, and windfalls. Stony terrain is also a sign of "devilishness": the hayfield called Devil’s Corner—"It was full of stones." In another etiological legend, a stony wilderness was named Devil’s Burden, as the stones allegedly fell from the torn satchel of the Devil himself while he was carrying them. A similar place in the Urals, called the Devil’s Settlement (Chertovo Gorodishche), is a conglomerate of tall rock pillars. One Ural researcher described the origin of the place’s name thus: "These stone structures, appearing from who knows when, do not resemble anything made by humans; only a devil could have built and lived there."

Such "places of power" are usually marked by monumental forms, and one of their main characteristics could be described with the phrase "apotheosis of naturalness."

Thus, the cyclopean natural formation near Kurkiyoki, located far from human habitation, represents, from the viewpoint of people from the traditional era, a kind of parody of a human church, and therefore belongs to the demonic world, hence the name Devil’s Church. However, the name might also hint at a real ancient pagan sanctuary of the Chud people (mythological early settlers of the lands in the Russian North), associated in folklore with the chthonic world—an awareness of which has faded from historical memory but has been preserved in the name of this place.