Victory Park
Hilltop park where a fallen dictator's pedestal now carries a twenty-two-meter copper mother figure with a sword.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Victory Park in Yerevan starts on the day in 1962 when Soviet work crews tried to remove a seventeen-meter statue of Stalin that had stood on this hilltop pedestal for twelve years, and something went wrong: the statue lurched as they wrestled it down, killing a worker and injuring several more. For five years afterward the pedestal stood empty, until sculptor Ara Harutyunyan replaced him in 1967 with Mother Armenia, modeled on a teenage store clerk named Genya Muradian, her base designed like a three-nave Armenian church. The guide also leads you inside the basalt pedestal itself, where a military museum traces the 1990s Karabakh war upstairs and keeps 1940s wartime portraits and generals' busts waiting in a dim basement below.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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