MOSCOW, September 9 Russian Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova told the country's President Vladimir Putin that the plan for the restoration of the Smolensk fortress will be ready by the end of the year .
The Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation has been gradually working to restore the fortress’s facilities since 2019. The department allocated about 140 million rubles to carry out priority emergency measures in some parts of the fortress. However, according to Lyubimova, this was not enough.
“If we now only talk about carrying out emergency work, then everything will stop there. We need to have a plan for further actions. Otherwise, it will hang again. We will do the most necessary so that it does not collapse, and that’s all, and then it will collapse again,” he said Putin Lyubimova at a meeting on socio-economic development of the Smolensk region.
Lyubimova replied to Putin that the plan would be ready by the end of the year. It will take five years to complete.
“The entire plan will be ready by the end of the year. And emergency work can be done during 2024-2025, while simultaneously restoring, if funds are allocated, objects of cultural heritage. If we talk about the plan itself (implementation – ed.), this is a matter of five years,” the Minister of Culture emphasized.
According to her, more than four billion rubles will be required to carry out emergency response work and restore the fortress’s facilities.
“Of course, the lion's share of the work still lies ahead… Primary emergency response work (will require – ed.) – 263 million rubles, and the restoration of the facilities itself is 4.2 billion rubles,” Lyubimova noted.
The Smolensk Fortress is a monument of defensive architecture, the largest surviving brick fortress in the world. In total, 18 towers and more than 3 kilometers of walls surrounding the central part of Smolensk have been preserved. The fortress's facilities occupy an area of over 35 hectares. The Smolensk fortress was at the epicenter of many events in the military history of the state, including the Russian-Polish wars of the 17th century, the Northern War, the Patriotic War of 1812, and the Great Patriotic War.
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