Laurel Wreath
Memorial Park Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers of the Great Patriotic War

1977
Georgy Frangulyan in collaboration with Mikhail Smirnov. Architect: lurii Zhuravkov
Wrought copper, bronze, and granite
6 m (19 ft. 8 in.), bas-relief height: 3.5 m (11 ft. 6 in.)
Bas-relief length along the perimeter: 50 m (164 ft.)
Novokuznetsk, Russia

Frangulyan’s first monumental sculpture—Memorial Park Dedicated to the Fallen Soldiers of the Great Patriotic War (known more simply as Laurel Wreath)

Laurel Wreath was initially designed in 1967 by Iurii Zhuravkov, an architect from Novokuznetsk. The structure would be under construction for almost ten years, and it finally opened in 1977 to honor the thirty-year anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War.  From 1974 to 1977, Frangulyan and Mikhail Smirnov, a Moscow sculptor, redesigned the interior frieze as wrought-copper sculptural reliefs.

The monument is a massive open-air quadrilateral square somewhat resembling the shape of a crown. Each of the monument’s four walls are twelve meters long and are suspended on granite columns four meters high. Frangulyan and Smirnov’s wraparound sculptural relief runs along the interior of the monument, and its totality depicts the Soviet narrative of the war. Three of the walls feature battle scenes; the fourth is dedicated entirely to the victory.

The monument’s interior reliefs owe much to the doctrinaire influence of the Stroganov Academy, where both Frangulyan and Smirnov studied.

In this context, the narratives represented in the monument’s reliefs, as well as the very concept of victory laurels, play on the rich mythology of the Soviet victory for a Brezhnev-era public conscience. Stepping into the monument’s interior, one also becomes part of the victory, continuously memorialized with a burning eternal flame. In Laurel Wreath, Soviet heroics find new expression through Stroganov-style visual idioms.