Monument to Swedes from their compatriots

The proposal to erect a monument to commemorate the Swedish warriors who had lost their lives in the Battle of Poltava was raised first in Sweden in 1890 by then Major Claus Grill. As a participant in the Russian-Swedish military exchange program, he had often been to Poltava and met Colonel Ivan Pavlovskiy.

Although his idea to erect a monument to the soldiers who had valiantly fought under Charles XII was welcomed by HM King Oscar II, it also triggered fierce debates in the press. While one group considered the idea to be shameful, others appealed for Christian mercy contending that fallen soldiers deserve a cross to be installed upon their last resting place.

By this time a famous Swedish sculptor Theodor Lundberg had completed a model of the monument and submitted it to the general public. It depicts Mother Swea, Sweden’s national symbol, unfurling a flag over a fallen soldier in the army of King Charles XII with a broken sword in his arm. The inscription on the monument says: “Filiis Pro Patria Occisis”, which means “To the Fatherland’s Fallen Sons”. Lundberg’s project was approved by the top Swedish authorities but instead of being erected on the Poltava Battle field, it was unveiled in front of the Swedish Army Museum in Stockholm on November 6th 1904 in the presence of then King Oscar II of Sweden.

Soon after the dedication of the first monument, 5,000 Swedish crowns were collected from citizens throughout the country to pay for the manufacturing of a big granite stone (6m height, 20 ton weight) in the Vånevik stone quarry in Småland. The second monument was more modest and, like a first one, it was created by design of the sculptor Theodor Lundberg. The same time an exchange with letters between Swedish and Russian governments regarding the construction of the Swedish monument in Poltava began. The sketch of the monument to be installed in Poltava was carefully reviewed and approved by the Russian government.

Theodor Lundberg supervised personally all stone processing work. The following inscription was carved on the stone in both Russian and Swedish: “This stone was erected in 1909 in the memory of the Swedes, who were perished in 1709, by their compatriots.”

The Swedish famous businessman Emmanuel Nobel, a nephew of Alfred Nobel, that time was engaged in the exploration and development of oil fields on the shelf of the Caspian Sea. When he got knew, that Swedish community is going to erect a monument to honor the warriors of King Charles XII killed in the Battle of Poltava, he decided to assume financial responsibility for the delivery and installation of the monument. Later on it turned out that the shipping charges exceeded the cost of the monument’s manufacturing in the stone quarry owned by the company “Swedish Granite Industry”. The “Odin” sea shipping company delivered the monument from Stockholm to Riga and then it was transported to Poltava by railway. The installation work was completed a few days before the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Poltava. The monument was installed on one of the three mounds near the village of Pobyvanka, not far from the road from Poltava to Zynkiv. In 1904, the archaeologist Liperovsky examined this mound and proved that the age of the human bones that were discovered there is about 500 years. Ivan Pavlovsky also expressed his doubts on whether the warriors of Charles XII were buried near the village Pobyvanka, because in his opinion the Russian army inflicted the heaviest losses on Swedes near the village of Maly Budyschi but not Pobyvanka.

In the summer of 1911 Carl Bennedich and Frei Rydeberg, two Swedish lieutenants from the Northern Scania Regiment, visited Poltava. They were sent to Poltava by the General Staff of the Swedish army for the purpose of organizing an archaeological survey of the Poltava Battle field to determine the main burial places of the soldiers of King Charles XII.

The excavations, carried out with the active support of Dr. Alexander Maltsev, then the director of the Poltava psychiatric hospital, revealed a large burial ground of soldiers of King Charles XII located from the north side of the hospital, near the so-called “small ravine”.

In the report sent by the Swedish officers to the General Staff, it was pointed out that “the unveiling of the Swedish monument on one of the three mounds near the village of Pobyvanka could be apprehended as an instinctual desire to place it as far as possible from the majestic monument on the common grave of Russian warriors. So, it is obvious even for those who are not specialist in the topic, that the decision to erect this monument in the place where it is now located was not based on reliable factual material.”

There is a legend among Poltava’s inhabitants saying that every year at the day of the Battle of Poltava with the first rays of the sun an image of a grieving mother appears on the granite surface of the Swedish monument.

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