Belgorod city official resigns after new mayor is sworn in to music from ‘Star Wars’

Lyudmila Grekova, the head of Belgorod’s Culture Department, has resigned after being blamed for botching the new mayor’s swearing-in ceremony, where he took the stage accompanied by the iconic opening music from the film “Star Wars.”

“We decided to change the music, to make it more modern. We settled on that much, but we didn’t specify. There was no malice here. I myself demanded that it shouldn’t be anything foreign, and this was the result. We dropped the ball,” Grekova said after the ceremony, according to the Telegram channel Baza.

Officially, the Belgorod mayor’s office attributed the “Star Wars” music to a mistake by the building’s sound engineer. Culture Department officials say they chose different musical accompaniment: David Tukhmanov’s “Ceremonial March.”