Chapel Monument to the Heroes of Plevna

The chapel monument to the grenadiers who fell at Plevna stands in Ilyinsky Square opposite the Polytechnic Museum, on the site of the dismantled Ilyinsky Gate of Kitay-gorod. It was put up in 1887, for the tenth anniversary of the third assault on Plevna, one of the hardest episodes of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. The money was collected by the surviving grenadiers and the officers of the regiments themselves, and the design was carried out free of charge by the architect and sculptor Vladimir Sherwood, author of the Historical Museum building. The monument is cast in iron and assembled in the form of an eight-sided tent crowned by an Orthodox cross treading down a crescent. Four high reliefs are placed on its faces: a peasant militiaman, a wounded soldier, a warrior tearing a child from the hands of a janissary, and a dying grenadier ripping the chains off a Bulgarian woman. Bronze plaques with the names of eighteen officers and more than six thousand rank-and-file soldiers once hung inside, along with an ever-burning lamp. In the Soviet years the chapel was ransacked and handed over for use as a storehouse; it was returned to believers only at the beginning of the nineties. Today it is raised on a high granite stylobate in the middle of the square, and it can be walked around on all sides.

On the map