Orange Monument
near Preobrazhenskaya street, 1B
Description:
The monument to the orange, created by sculptor Alexander Tokarev, was opened in Odessa on September 2, 2004 in honor of the 210th anniversary of the city.
According to legend, once it was oranges that saved Odessa from decline. Paul I did not like the beginnings of Catherine II, for this reason, funding for the construction of the Odessa port was stopped. Learning about the Emperor’s love for oranges, the inhabitants of Odessa sent him in February as a present 3,000 Greek oranges, which at that time in Russia were an outlandish commodity. A few months later, Odessa received $250,000 for the construction of the port.
The sculpture itself, with a diameter of about 12 meters, is a bronze orange mounted on a pedestal. Inside it, instead of one of the lobes, there is a statue of Paul I and three horses harnessed into an orange.