Today Kenai is the largest city on the Kenai Peninsula — a fishing and oil town that has kept both its Old Town church and its salmon river. Our Kenai designs gather that identity — the bear-and-1959 emblem, the onion domes, the river and the inlet — into wearable form. Kenai, Alaska — Old Town on the bluff, where the river meets the sea.
What stayed longest was the church. The Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Russian Orthodox Church, finished in 1896, is the oldest standing Russian Orthodox church in Alaska — a National Historic Landmark whose blue domes still rise over Old Town, with the small St. Nicholas Chapel of 1906 beside it on the old fort ground. Inside the church hangs a centuries-old icon of Our Lady of Kazan, among the oldest non-Native artworks in Alaska. More than a century on, the services are still held; Old Town Kenai is not a recreated village but a living one, a piece of Russian America that never quite left.
Why People Visit Kenai
Kenai pairs deep history with wide-open Alaska — a living Russian-era church, a salmon river that sets the summer's rhythm, and the long view across Cook Inlet to the mountains. It's accessible, working, and real: a Last-Frontier town that kept its old bones.
