Liberation80: Gilded Statue at Slavin Had to Be Restored, Attracts Lightning

Bratislava, April 5 (TASR) - The monumental statue of a soldier with a gilded top on the central granite column of the Slavin Memorial had to be completely restored several years ago because among other things it was attracting lightning due to its elevation, TASR was told by Robert Kovac, head of city-owned company Marianum - Funeral Services, which administers the Slavin Memorial, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bratislava and the 65th anniversary of the opening of Slavin. "The column, Trizuljak's statue and the mosaic ceiling of the ceremony room have been restored," added the director of the organisation, which is responsible for Bratislava's war cemeteries, including the 10,000-square-metre area of the Slavin Memorial. The statue of a soldier on top of the obelisk to some extent symbolically compensates for the consequences of insensitive actions of the totalitarian regime, which at the time of the construction of Slavin had the tower of a nearby church demolished under the pretext of disturbed statics. "The church had a 50-metre tower, and as the hill is higher, it would have been slightly taller than Slavin," said historian Ivo Stassel, the director of the Municipal Institute for the Preservation of Monuments in Bratislava. Alexander Trizuljak, the creator of the statue of the Soviet soldier on Slavin, opposed the plan to demolish the church tower, and when he failed, he decided to take an unconventional step. "He was a deeply religious man. If you look at that statue from behind, you will see that he incorporated a cross into it. It's made up of a flag pole and a machine gun that he holds horizontally. In this way, it is as if he transferred the symbol from [the church] to Slavin," pointed out Stassel. Towering above the capital city's skyline, the Slavin monument was made by sculptor and architect Jan Svetlik. The memorial was built in 1957-60 on the burial grounds of fallen Soviet soldiers. "It is a monument to the liberators of Bratislava and western Slovakia who were killed in the battles for liberation in 1945. There are six mass graves and 317 individual graves," said Kovac, adding that the nearly 7,000 buried can't be sorted by nationality, but they included all those who belonged to the Soviet Union at the time, such as Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Georgians and Kazakhs. Despite the ideological pressures on the creators of the memorial, it was, in his opinion, quite well managed architecturally. "It is still a monument to the liberation of Bratislava, it's a monument that is worthy of respect. There are several thousand people buried beneath it," said the historian. am/df