The trampling of the Persian carpet

We are lucky to live in an era of “remembrance perpetuation”. Not a day goes by that the media did not flash information that somewhere put another monument or screwed another memorial plaque. In the information flow, events are lost that remind descendants of truly extraordinary people whose fates really influenced the history of the state. This person is dedicated to the monument that appeared in the Crimea on the embankment of the city of Feodosiya on November 28, 2020.

In the rush of attack on the enemy raised on the racks of the war horse. The rider is confident in the saddle. Holds the reins firmly with his left hand. On the right is a naked sword. A horse tears up its hooves, carelessly abandoned, a Persian carpet under his feet. The monument turned out to be dynamic, as well as the hero’s combat fate itself. A great impression is also made by a bright carpet with a Persian pattern under the hooves of a war horse made by the method of multicolor mosaics.

This is what sculptor Andrei Korobtsov and architect Konstantin Fomin saw as the hero of the Russian-Persian war “meteor general” Pyotr Stepanovich Kotlyarevsky (1782-1851). In many ways, it was his exploits that led to the signing of peace with Russia by Persia, which recognized the entry into the Russian Empire of Eastern Georgia, the northern part of modern Azerbaijan, Imereti, Guria, Mingrelia and Abkhazia.

The Russian-Persian War occurred in 1804-1813 and was in the shadow of the Patriotic War of 1912 with Napoleon Bonaparte. The battle of Borodino and the burning of Moscow overshadowed the battles of the Caucasian theater of military operations, in which the general’s leadership talent from the infantry of P. S. Kotlyarevsky shone.

The Russian blood shed in Asia, on the banks of Arax and the Caspian Sea, is no less precious than that shed in Europe, on the banks of Moscow and the Seine, and the bullets of Gauls and Persians cause the same suffering. P. S. Kotlyarevsky.

For the hero, the war ended with a severe head wound and, in our understanding, disability. The state of his health did not allow Kotlyarevsky to respond in 1826 even to the proposal of Nicholas I to lead the Caucasian army. For the rest of his life he suffered from severe headaches. They were especially painful during the cold winter months. Why he moved, on the advice of doctors, to the relatively warm Feodosia, where he lived the last 13 years of his life. He was buried here.

Feodosia monument is not the only, besides, not the most famous work of monumental art, part of which is a mosaic carpet. More famous is another sculptural work located in the cemetery of Saint-Geneviève de Bois in the suburbs of Paris. The tombstone of one of the graves was a “carpet”, made in the technique of Byzantine mosaics with a visual effect of tissue texture. The tombstone was erected in 1996 on the grave of Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993), an outstanding ballet dancer of the last century.