Saaremaa municipality planning €125,000 Bellingshausen monument
A €125,000 procurement has been launched to build a monument to Admiral Bellingshausen in Saaremaa. The deadline is April 22.
In August 2014, a call to create and design a monument to Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen in Kuressaare was announced, minusaarema.ee wrote. Six entries were received and the competition committee selected Coastal Ice (Rannikujää) by Gunnar Vares, a blacksmith from Saaremaa. But in 2019, the project lost funding because it was said to be weak.
The white and black marble monument, designed in honor of Admiral Bellingshausen, an explorer from Saare County, was originally planned to be opened on the shores of Kuressaare Raiekivi in the summer of 2020.
The explorer Fabian Gottlieb Benjamin von Bellingshausen (1778–1852), born in Lahetaguse manor in Saare County was a Russian admiral of Baltic German origin. He led the Antarctic expedition from 1819 to 1821 and was probably the first of three sailors to see the Antarctic coast for the first time in 1820.
Last year a boat named the Admiral Bellingshausen sailed from Saaremaa to Antarctica to commemorate the anniversary. President Kersti Kaljulaid also joined the voyage.
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Editor: Roberta Vaino, Helen Wright
