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[Alexandr Korol]

– Those are some summer cabins, they operate as a tourist base in the summer. Some drunks stay there for 500 rubles, 1000 rubles a night, just to fish.
– That’s a problem. Why would I want drunks on the lake?

So we start digging, looking for information about what this property is. And — bam — it’s listed for sale on Avito. I buy it just to make sure there are no neighbors. Again, it’s that whole pandemic uncertainty, and the people selling the tourist base are all in shock, panicking — should they sell, shouldn’t they? But what’s funny is that while this deal is happening, my childhood friend, who’s never been to Karelia, writes to me. He’s heard that I went to Karelia, that I looked at something there. But you understand, Karelia is a huge area, there are just many cities. And he sends me an ad on Avito, saying a Finnish farm is for sale, and he says, “Maybe it’ll interest you.” I look at it and see that it’s an abandoned Finnish farm, rotten, with a decayed roof, no electricity, nothing — just the bottom of the barrel, a 100-year-old building, located right there on the shore of the same river, the same lake, just in the forest, where I am. And that’s when I understood even more, “Okay, higher forces, I got you.” I mean, “they,” some kind of force, well, some force. Later, I figured out what kind of force it was. But this force, it’s so powerful, it controls everything, and it simply made it so I had the money for all of this. It made it so that I immediately arrived from America to Russia the next day, that it immediately — through all my acquaintances — was influencing me to go to Karelia. And it made everything fall into place so I would buy all these properties. Then I bought everything else around, so there would be no neighbors left. And so I bought it all. The pandemic begins, which gives me a second shock. Why? Because I realize that maybe everyone is going to die now. Well, maybe this higher force brought me here, to this forest, to this wilderness, to save me and my family. I’m in shock. And I had just started construction in the spring. Then the quarantine begins, and you can’t stay in any hotels in the nearest town, everything shuts down. Super checks, all those COVID restrictions. And we still had to somehow oversee the property to monitor the construction. I make the decision — I had wanted to build a castle right away — I decide that it would be better to restore the tourist base first, to get it in order. Again, it was still called a tourist base back then. Naturally, it was a non-commercial project,