Black Tulip, War memorial in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
The Black Tulip is a war memorial in Yekaterinburg dedicated to soldiers who died in military service. A bronze statue of a soldier sitting with a rifle stands at the center, surrounded by ten metal pillars arranged like the cargo space of a transport plane.
The memorial was completed in 1995 and honors Russian soldiers who died during military operations in Afghanistan. It was later expanded to include those who died in the Chechen conflict.
The name comes from the An-12 transport planes that carried the coffins home from Afghanistan; the veterans themselves called these aircraft "Black Tulips". The memorial's ten metal pylons, each 10 metres tall, stand around the seated soldier like the frame of a fuselage, so the visitor stands inside the cargo hold. Wreaths are laid at the stone base.
The memorial stands on ploshchad Sovetskoy Armii, within the block bounded by Lunacharskogo, Pervomayskaya, Mamina-Sibiryaka and Shartashskaya streets. The bronze soldier weighs 4.5 tonnes and rises 4.7 metres, while the ten pylons reach 10 metres, so the names carved on them are best read up close. Wreaths lie along the front edge of the stone base.
The memorial's ten metal pylons carry 240 names of Sverdlovsk residents killed in Afghanistan, and the central soldier figure weighs 4.5 tonnes at a height of 4.7 metres. The pylons themselves rise 10 metres, modelled on the fuselage frame of the cargo plane that flew the dead home.
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