Interesting facts about Petrozavodsk: fishermen in trousers

Our town is very beautiful and of course its symbol is Lake Onego.  One couldn’t invent a better framing for our lake than our embankment, the most popular place in town, where all the celebrations and holidays take place. Moreover, our embankment is an open-air gallery of sculptures, which were presented to Petrozavodsk by our sister-cities.  One of them, the first one to have appeared here is “Fishermen”, presented by the city of Duluth that is in Minnesota (the USA). It’s a monument, made of metal sticks depicting two men fishing together with a dragnet.  The author Rafael Consuegra explained that as this team work made an American guy and a Russian guy became friends, the same way two cities, Petrozavodsk and Duluth would be friends. His intention appeared to come true. Local people liked the monument very much and it started being surrounded by different jokes and legends. 

One legend says that these fishermen are not just 2 men from Russia and America, but they are two apostles Peter and Andrey which were also fishermen, and one of them brought Christianity to the western part of the world, and the other – to the Eastern part, that’s why Orthodoxy differs a bit from other types of Christianity. It was 1991 when the sculpture was set on the embankment. Imagine, the Soviet Union had just collapsed, that’s why no one was brave enough to tell this story about religion at that time. And it’s hard to say now whether R. Consuegra really had this idea about apostles or not. But it’s interesting that for some time after the sculpture’d appeared the locals suspected that this monument is nothing but an American spying antenna (1991!). But now we tell it as a joke. By the way “the fishermen” have a nickname. Some people call them two skeletons fighting a spider’s web, or sometimes they are called a monument to web designers. On the New Years Eve they are usually got dressed as a Father Frost and a Snow-maiden (Russian traditional New Year’s characters).  In summer  they seem a bit naked but every winter they wear ice trousers.  Come to Petrozavodsk with EnjoyRussiAn!

More info: enjoyrussian.com