The legendary Russian battle cruiser Aurora has been towed from its traditional post in St. Petersburg to the Kronstadt shipyard for repairs, ITAR-TASS reports. For the first time since 1987, when the museum-ship was last repaired, residents St. Petersburg had the opportunity to watch the Aurora be towed by tugboats under overhanging arms of Troitsky, Dvortsovy and Blagoveshchensky bridges. Tugboats towed the cruiser to a dockyard of Kronshtadt maritime plant for a distance of 40 kilometers.
Defence Ministry hopes that the cruiser will return to its ‘eternal mooring’ berth at the Petrograd embankment after the overhaul in 2016. Deadlines for repairs will be announced after the ship is docked and the underwater part of its hull is examined, chief of the culture department of Defence Ministry Anton Gubankov said.
After the overhaul an exposition on board the museum-ship will almost double, meanwhile, the 1917 events, including the October Revolution, will cease to be its main topic, Ruslan Nekhai, director of the Central Naval Museum, announced earlier.
In the previous year the warship celebrated the 110th anniversary of its commissioning. The gun cruiser was on combat duty in the Navy for almost half a century from 1903 to 1948, fighting in the battles of the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, the Great Patriotic War and the 1917 revolutionary events.
In 1948 the battle cruiser was moored at the Petrograd embankment and has served as a training base for Leningrad Nakhimov Naval Academy up to 1956. In 1957 cruiser Aurora was turned in a museum ship, hosting a branch of the Central Naval Museum. In 1992 the St. Andrew naval flag was hoisted aboard the warship. Now the cruiser is registered in Culture Ministry as a federal cultural heritage site.
Russkiy Mir Foundation Information Service
