Katyn war cemetery, Military cemetery in Katyn village, Smolensk Oblast, Russia.
Katyn War Cemetery is a Polish military cemetery in Gnezdovo, Smolensk Oblast, designed by Zdzisław Pidek, Andrzej Sołyga, Wiesław and Jacek Synakiewicz and built in 1999–2000. It holds the graves of 4,421 Polish officers and officer cadets from the Kozelsk camp, shot by the NKVD in 1940. A memorial complex, opened on 28 July 2000, also includes a Russian section with graves of Soviet repression victims and a 2017 exhibition centre.
The Polish military cemetery in Katyn was built between 1999 and 2000 on the initiative of the Federation of Katyn Families, designed by Zdzisław Pidek, Andrzej Sołyga, Wiesław and Jacek Synakiewicz. It was inaugurated on 28 July 2000, the second of four Katyn burial sites created in 2000–2012. It holds 4,421 officers and officer cadets from the Kozelsk camp, shot by the NKVD in 1940 and brought by train to Gniezdowo station.
Every spring Polish delegations come to Katyn to honour the dead, joined by the Smolensk regional administration; in 2010 the visiting delegation died in a plane crash near Smolensk. On 24 June 2022 the Polish flag was removed from the memorial, and the director of the Museum of Modern History of Russia called the two flags a symbol of friendship that no longer applied.
The memorial is a branch of the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia in Moscow, not of a Smolensk museum. It lies in the Katyn forest near the village of Gniezdovo, west of Smolensk, and the Polish war cemetery was inaugurated on 28 July 2000. The grounds are visited on foot along marked paths.
The location joins two separate historical tragedies under one name: the 1940 killings and later victims of Stalin's repression. This connection is made explicit through the physical structure of the ground itself.
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