Monument to Vita Cherevichkin

Back in 1961, in the very center of the city of Rostov-on-Don, then still Pioneer Park, a bronze monument to the boy-hero of the Patriotic War Vita Cherevichkin was installed. Later, the park was renamed, and now it bears the name of a small hero, brutally shot by the Nazis.

All Rostov residents know the history of Viti, a teenager who lived during the German occupation in Rostov-on-Don. He was a simple child from an ordinary working family. His greatest passion was pigeons, and he spent all his free time with them.

The Germans, who seized the city, ordered the inhabitants to get rid of the birds, fearing that they would be used to transmit information to the nearby Red Army headquarters.

Why Vitya did not obey the order is still unknown. Perhaps he loved his feathered friends very much, and it was difficult for him to part with them, or perhaps he did pass notes with them to the command of the Russian army.

Vitya Cherevichkin was shot in the city center, where he was buried together with other soldiers of the Russian army.

In memory of the heroic act of the boy, about his resistance to the enemy, the Rostovites erected a monument in the form of a boy with a pigeon in his hands and named the park after him.