Kezenoi-Am is a mountain lake on the southern slope of the Andi Ridge, on the border between the Vedensky District of Chechnya and the Botlikhsky District of Dagestan; most of its water lies in Chechnya. It is also known as Eizenam, Retlo and Bolshoye Forelnoye, the Great Trout Lake.
It is the largest lake in Chechnya and the largest mountain lake in the North Caucasus: Yu. Efremov counts only three lakes larger than a square kilometre in the whole Greater Caucasus, and Kezenoi-Am is the biggest of them. Its area is given differently: 1.7 km² according to the Institute of Limnology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Efremov, 2.3 km² in the State Water Register. The water level changes by 6–8 m from year to year, so its elevation is quoted differently too: 1,854 m on the topographic map, 1,869 m in guidebooks, 1,822 m in L. Berg's work of 1948.
The greatest depth is 72 m: that is the figure of the Institute of Limnology and Efremov, and a Russian Geographical Society expedition found the bottom at the same mark in 2011. Berg gives 74 m. It is not the deepest lake in the North Caucasus: Lower Blue Lake, Tserik-Kel, in Kabardino-Balkaria is almost four times deeper, at 279–292 m. Among the lakes of the Greater Caucasus, Efremov ranks Kezenoi-Am third by depth, after Lakes Bolshaya and Malaya Ritsa in Abkhazia.
It is a landslide-dammed lake: at some point a landslide blocked the valley, and the natural dam on the western side rises more than 100 m. This is how the Institute of Limnology and Efremov describe its origin. Local people have a legend of their own: the village of Kezenoi once stood where the lake is and sank into the ground as a punishment for its inhabitants.
In the wild, the Eizenam trout, described by Berg in 1948, lived in this lake alone. In 1963–1964 it was moved to Lake Mochokh in Dagestan. In Kezenoi-Am itself the last reliable catch was in 2015, an adult fish of over 10 kg, and the young had disappeared even earlier. The causes were chub and perch introduced into the lake, poaching and war. The surviving population now lives in Dagestan, about 200 adult fish, and a restoration programme has been drawn up around it. The trout is listed in the Red Data Book of Russia. There is no salmon in the lake.
The shore is hardly deserted. In the 1970s and 1980s it hosted a training base for the Soviet Olympic rowing team. Since April 2015 the Kezenoi-Am complex has been operating here: a 58-room hotel, cottages, a restaurant, a bathhouse, a boat station and a pier. In 2017 the lake hosted an international sailing regatta.
In winter the lake freezes, with ice 60–80 cm thick, and in summer the surface water warms to no more than 17–18 °C. From Grozny it is about 100 km by road via Shali and Vedeno, roughly 1 hour 50 minutes by car; guidebooks give anything from 90 to 110 km.
