The reconnaissance and diving team of Konstantin Bogdanov will go to honor the memory of the dead sailors and tell about the victories of Russian weapons in the Baltic. The first stage of the expedition “Voices of Lost Ships” with the support of the Russian Geographical Society and the Presidential Grants FundComrade will begin on May 6 and will last 10 days.
The expedition team “Voices of Lost Ships” in the new season will tell not only about the lost ships of the Tallinn breakthrough, but also about the victories of Soviet weapons. One of the goals of the expedition is to survey the German floating battery West.
– Sunk in 1943, West was one of the largest targets of the Soviet naval hydroaviation in the Baltic during the Great Patriotic War, – tells the leader of the expedition Konstantin Bogdanov. – One of our main tasks is to tell about this victory, describe the details of the event, establish the names of the pilots, take photos and videos of the floating battery to show the damage that led to its death. It will be interesting to show the results in 3D model format.
Also in the May expedition, work will continue on creating photogrammetric models of the Burya patrol ship and the minesweeper Fugas.
We have a tradition continues Konstantin Bogdanov. “At all the objects we have discovered, we hold a ceremony to perpetuate the memory and install memorial plaques with a list of the crew. Last year, they installed the Burya on the patrol ship, but they did not have time on the Minesweeper. We plan to do it by May 9th.
The tradition of installing memorial plaques on ships that died during the war was born in the expedition “Bow to the ships of the Great Victory” in 2005, when the main area of exploration was concentrated in the Black Sea. At that time, diving was actively developing, and divers, when diving on a particular object, not knowing its history, often tried to take away some part of it as a keepsake.
— We began to install memorial plaques so that divers understand where they went down — explains Konstantin Bogdanov. – We found out how many people died on this ship during the war years – we list them all by name. Until now, divers are diving in the Black Sea, reading historical tablets, cleaning them of growths, and it can already be said with confidence that our mission has to some extent achieved its goal. People understand that they are visiting not just a sunken ship, but a military burial. We transferred this tradition to the Baltic. The most important thing for us is to preserve the memory of these people. When all the filming work is done, we go down and, like in a cemetery, we set up a kind of monument. For us, this has a symbolic meaning – a mass grave should be inscribed with who is buried in it.
The future plans of Konstantin Bogdanov’s Reconnaissance and Diving Team for the season include a survey of the Second Five-Year Plan transport, the last major participant in the Tallinn breakthrough in Russian territorial waters, as well as the Vyborg transport. The absolutely defenseless Vyborg was the only one that a Finnish submarine could sink at the beginning of the war.
The expedition members will create 3D models of the lost ships, identify damage and fill in a few more unknown pages in the history of the Great Patriotic War.
