Monument to Peter the Great

For Taganrog’s two-hundredth anniversary, the city council decided to erect a bronze statue of the city’s founder. The sculptor Mark Antokolsky provided an already completed model for it, while residents collected donations for the bronze, pedestal, and transport. The first casting failed, so the figure was made again and brought to Taganrog via Marseille and Feodosia. A tall pedestal at the edge of the cape holds the statue for which Taganrog residents raised money.

In the bronze Peter’s left hand is a spyglass, and in his right, a cane. The sculptor turned his face toward the harbor. The inscription on the pedestal links the emperor’s name with the year Taganrog was founded.

Peter the Great came to this cape after a military setback. In the First Azov Campaign, Russian forces could not maintain the blockade of the Turkish fortress from the sea. The tsar ordered a flotilla to be built, took Azov in the Second Azov Campaign, but the ships needed a harbor of their own: the shallow Don River was unsuitable for a large base.

In July sixteen ninety-six, Peter traveled along the shore in rowing boats with military officers and engineers. They compared two capes and chose the high, rocky Tagan Rog. Two years later, the tsar ordered a harbor for warships to be built here, with a fortress above it. Troitsky Town on Tagan Rog, the future Taganrog, grew up around the construction sites. The port below and the town on the cape arose from this decision; that is why Peter is called the founder on the pedestal.

Almost two centuries later, the public-health doctor Pavel Iordanov was tasked by the city council with erecting a monument to the founder for Taganrog’s two-hundredth anniversary. The city did not have the full sum ready: funds were raised through donations. Iordanov asked his former Gymnasium schoolmate, the writer Anton Chekhov, to find a sculptor in Paris and arrange work that the city could afford.

Anton Chekhov chose an existing statue by Mark Antokolsky. The sculptor created it in eighteen seventy-two and agreed to provide the model free of charge, leaving the city to cover the costs of bronze, the pedestal, and delivery. Anton Chekhov collected donations from Taganrog residents in Moscow, St Petersburg, and Paris, while Mark Antokolsky oversaw the casting. The first bronze copy failed; the master ordered the work to be repeated. The second figure was delivered to Taganrog via Marseille and Feodosia in nineteen oh one. It then lay for another two years in a railway warehouse while Pavel Iordanov worked to have the pedestal and the site completed.

Anton Chekhov proposed placing Peter above the sea. He noticed that Mark Antokolsky had modeled the hair and the skirts of the caftan as if wind were blowing them from the direction of the statue’s face. This meant that the sea had to be in front of Peter. The council chose a site by the city garden on Petrovskaya Street. In May nineteen oh three, Pavel Iordanov unveiled the completed monument there. Mark Antokolsky did not live to see that day, and the seriously ill Anton Chekhov could not come to Taganrog; a year later, Anton Chekhov died as well.

In nineteen twenty-four, the bronze figure was removed from the pedestal. It was kept at Chekhov Library, in the courtyard and in the halls of the local history museum. In nineteen thirty-two, the monument was to be sent for melting down, but Taganrog residents appealed to Stepan Vardanyan, head of the city party committee, and he secured the cancellation of its destruction. After further relocations, Peter was finally installed at the tip of the cape in nineteen forty-eight—where Anton Chekhov had wanted to see him. The spyglass in the bronze figure’s left hand is still aimed at the harbor for which Peter the Great chose Tagan Rog.