The road kept changing, as if it obeyed some mythic logic of its own. From a solid highway you have to turn onto an old, battered strip of asphalt, then weave through forests and half-abandoned villages until you find the drop-off to a dirt track. A few more kilometres, the last turn, a small footbridge over a stream—and we roll into the village of Kamen (“Stone”).

By the very first house you leave the car. The road ends—and you don’t drive up to a shrine in a chariot. From there, as mystical etiquette demands, you go on foot: along a path through a thin birchwood and across a field, a full kilometre to a deep ravine where it waits—the Stone by the village of Stone.

Perhaps long ago, in times now beyond reach, it had another name. If so, the knowledge is lost. They say that in the old days, on Kupala Night, as many as eight pairs of dancers could gather here and dance a quadrille. Looking at the Stone, you can believe it: we had never seen a giant like this before.

The information plaque claims it is roughly nine metres long, eight metres wide, and over five metres high. An archaic way of seeing the world would have singled out this phenomenon without hesitation—and made it sacred.

In truth, although some festivities still take place here around Kupala, almost nothing has survived about the nature of the Stone’s cult, or the ritual-magical practices once associated with it. Despite its monumental size—the largest boulder in Novgorod Oblast—the Stone is remarkably well hidden in the floodplain of the Shelepsky stream. The water loops around it like a ribbon, separating the shrine from the ordinary human world with a symbolic, sacred boundary. From the field you cross on the way in, it isn’t visible at all.

All the more surprising, then, is what you find down in the hollow: near the Stone there are no horseflies, no bloodsuckers—none of the old enemies of humankind that torment travellers up in the field. Their absence, the quiet, and the immense body of rock warmed by the summer sun—all of it invites meditation, and certain practices.

A wooden ladder has been thoughtfully set against the Stone. We climbed up onto the back of this giant and lay sprawled across it, trying—now to catch the beat of its stony heart, now to merge with it and receive its Knowledge, now simply to stare, emptied of thought, into the blue sky.

But the Stone keeps its secrets. And we understood: if we want them, we’ll have to come back—again, and for longer.

Sleep well, Stone. Until we meet again.

Climbing back up into the field and turning for one last look, you realise once more that this long, dusty, bone-rattling journey was worth every kilometre.