In the 1960s, a so-called "Green Belt of Glory" was created around St. Petersburg, which includes several dozen different monuments and memorials dedicated to the heroic defense of Leningrad. Today, I will talk about one of the most emotionally harrowing monuments. It is the "Flower of Life" monument, located in the Vsevolozhsky District of the Leningrad Region.
Anyone who has traveled at least once along the Road of Life, connecting St. Petersburg and Lake Ladoga, has seen this 15-meter concrete memorial, erected in memory of the children who died during the 900-day siege of Leningrad.
The monument is located at the third kilometer of the Road of Life, along which, during the harsh years of the blockade, Leningrad residents were evacuated from the besieged city. The monument, shaped like a giant concrete flower, was designed by architect Pavel Melnikov and installed in the valley of the Lubya River in the autumn of 1968. On the stone daisy are carved the words of the famous children's song "Let There Always Be Sunshine." On another petal, the face of a schoolboy is depicted.
During the blockade, children, like adults, had to endure all the horrors of war: hunger, cold, endless bombings, and artillery shelling. Over nearly 900 days, about 150,000 shells and more than 100,000 incendiary and high-explosive bombs were dropped on Leningrad. As a result, about three thousand buildings were completely destroyed, and around seven thousand more were seriously damaged. Children and teenagers actively participated in building defensive structures: pillboxes, barricades, and anti-tank obstacles. Only three percent of Leningrad residents died as a result of bombings and artillery shelling; the remaining 97 percent died from hunger and cold. According to official data, this amounts to 630,000 people, tens of thousands of whom were children. The "Flower of Life" memorial was created in their memory.
In the 1970s, next to the concrete flower appeared the Alley of Friendship, planted by participants of the All-Union Pioneer Rally delegation. On both sides of the alley, commemorative signs are installed, dedicated to pioneer heroes, young partisans, and home front workers, and it ends with another memorial. The mourning mound is a small artificial hill where, surrounded by birch trees, blocks are installed with words carved from Tanya Savicheva’s diary.
The first entry in her famous diary was made by 11-year-old Tanya Savicheva on December 28, 1941. On that day, her older sister Zhenya died. By mid-May 1942, Tanya was the only one left from her large family. After that, she was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to the territory of present-day Nizhny Novgorod Region, where she died on July 1, 1944, from bone tuberculosis and other accompanying diseases such as extreme dystrophy. Her blockade diary became a testament to the horrors of those terrible 900 days, in memory of which a birch grove was planted next to the "Flower of Life" memorial: 900 trees — one for each day of the blockade.
Sources:
https://dzen.ru/a/Xi2d15UV7gCup9GF
