Historic Sevastopol panorama ‘virtually destroyed’ in Ukrainian drone strike, local officials say. Museum says original fragments weren’t there.
Franz Roubaud’s panoramic painting The Siege of Sevastopol has been “virtually destroyed” in a Ukrainian drone strike, Mikhail Razvozhaev, the Russian-appointed governor of Sevastopol, said.
The attack came in the early hours of June 10. Razvozhaev reported at around 4 a.m. Moscow time that the museum’s roof was on fire. Hours later, he said the blaze had been declared a level four, with more than 80 people working at the scene.
“The situation is extremely dire: it is already clear that Franz Roubaud’s great masterpiece has been virtually destroyed,” Razvozhaev wrote.
He claimed the Ukrainian Armed Forces had deliberately targeted the museum. Ukraine has not commented on the attack.
Mikhail Razvozhaev’s Telegram channel
The museum said, however, that fragments of the original Roubaud painting were undamaged. The museum holds 39 fragments of the original canvas in total; at the time of the fire, all of them were stored elsewhere.
“What was inside the building was a canvas painted in 1954 by a group of Soviet artists,” the museum said.
The panorama The Siege of Sevastopol was unveiled in 1905, marking the 50th anniversary of the first defense of the city during the Crimean War. It was created by Franz Roubaud, widely regarded as the founder of Russia’s school of battle and panoramic painting.
Roubaud spent four years on the work. For his subject, he chose the repulse of the assault on Malakhov Kurgan on June 6 (18), 1855. The building housing the painting was designed by military engineer Friedrich Oskar Enberg.
A fragment of “The Siege of Sevastopol”
Prisma / UIG / Getty Images
In June 1942, a German air raid and artillery bombardment set the panorama building ablaze. To save the painting, workers cut it into sections, but only two-thirds of it — 86 fragments — survived. Those pieces were evacuated to Novorossiysk and then transported to Moscow, where Soviet artists used them to reconstruct the panorama. The museum reopened on the 100th anniversary of the “first defense.”
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First Defense of Sevastopol
The Crimean War began in the autumn of 1853. A year later, in September 1854, the combined forces of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia blockaded the Russian fleet off the coast of the Crimean Peninsula. On September 13, the siege of Sevastopol began; it lasted 11 months. More than 150,000 people were killed. The battles for the city during the Crimean War are known as the First Defense of Sevastopol. The Second Defense of Sevastopol refers to the fighting of 1941–1942, at the start of World War II.