Pleven Panorama

Worth a detour

Nikolay Ovechkin and twelve other Russian and Bulgarian painters produced a canvas 115 metres round and 15 high, with a modelled foreground running into it, opened on 10 December 1977 — a hundred years to the day after Osman Pasha surrendered. It stands in Skobelev Park on the ground itself, beside the Kovanlak redoubt. Lifts take you up to roof platforms looking out over the redoubts and the Dead Valley.

Story

Background

The siege of Pleven ran for five months in 1877 and was the hinge of the Russo-Turkish war. Three assaults on the town failed at enormous cost before a blockade starved it out; Osman Pasha surrendered on 10 December. Pleven has since built something close to two hundred monuments to the Russian, Romanian and Bulgarian dead, and this is the largest of them.

Inside are four spaces. An introductory hall sets up the war; the panorama itself shows the third assault of 11–12 September; a diorama gives the last fighting on 10 December; a closing hall covers the capitulation and the winter crossing of the Balkan range. The painted part is by a team of thirteen led by Ovechkin of the Grekov military studio in Moscow, and the seam between canvas and modelled foreground is genuinely hard to find from the viewing platform, which is the whole trick of a panorama.

The building, by Ivo Petrov and Plamena Tsacheva, is not shy. The drum appears to rest on four bayonets, which carry four horizontal rings: three for the three assaults, and a fourth worked as a frieze for the siege. Two and a half million people came in the first three years. It remains the thing most Bulgarians picture when they hear the word Pleven.