Panorama: the defense of Sevastopol during the Crimean War 1853 - 56
Apart from being an amazing work of art, the Panorama at Sevastopol gives British, French and Turkish and Sardinian visitors the opportunity to view the war from behind `enemy' lines - from the Russian perspective.

Both sides had their heroes and both sides suffered dreadful privations. This is a chance to stand in the other side's shoes.
The Panorama occupies most of the circular building in a park on Istoricheskiy Bulvar (Historic Boulevard). It's a huge 360 degree re-creation of the defense of Sevastopol, consisting of a 4m high painting which forms a 115m circular backdrop to a life-size reconstructed view of the defenses. The painting is cleverly merged into the foreground modelwork so that a real sense of perspective is created, and you stand at the centre with the battle all around you. It's hard to do justice to the experience in words - or in photos, which inevitably flatten the picture and give you only a part of the panoramic view.

The Panorama was created in 1905 to mark the 50-year anniversary of the defence of Sevastopol by the painter France Alekseevich Rubaud, Professor of Applied Arts at the Academy in St Petersburg, who specialised in battlefield paintings. He researched the battle locally, talking to eye-witnesses, and then went to Germany to paint the enormous canvas in sections with the help of other artists and of art students at the Bavarian Academy. When the exhibition opened in May 1905, veterans of the battle were among the first to view it.

In 1942 the museum was hit by German bombs and the painting caught fire. Russian soldiers and sailors managed to rescue 86 separate sections of the painting from the burning building. These were taken to Novorossiisk on the Tashkent, the last ship out of Sevastopol, evacuating 2000 wounded, women and children.

After the war, using photographs and the original artists' sketches, and with the advice of military experts, a group of soviet painters led by academician V. N. Yakovlev the work was restored and opened to the public again in 1954, 100 years after the battle.

The siege of Sevastopol (known as Sebastopol to the British at the time) lasted for nearly a year. A young Russian army officer who later went on to write, among many works, "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", described what he experienced during the siege in Tales of Sevastopol:


The glow of morning is just beginning to tint the sky over Sapoun Hill...On the North side daytime activities are gradually replacing the tranquillity of night: here with muskets rattling a detachment of soldiers is marching to relieve the guard; there a doctor is hastening to the hospital; a soldier clambers out of his dugout, washes his bronzed face with icy water and, turning to the East now rosy with the dawn, mutters his prayers and rapidly crosses himself; a tall, heavy camel-drawn majara goes creaking towards a cemetery to bury the gory corpses with which it is laden almost to the top...

You have barely climbed a little way, when bullets begin to wizz through the air both to the right and left, and you will perhaps ask yourself whether it would not be better to go along the trench that winds parallel with the road. But that trench is filled knee-deep with liquid, yellow stinking mud, and you will certainly prefer the road up the hill, the more so that you see everybody going by the road.

Suddenly there is a terrific roar which sends a shock not only through your ears, but through your whole body and makes you tremble from head to foot.The next thing you hear is the receding shriek of a shell, and a thick cloud of gunpowder smoke envelopes you, the platform and the black figures of the soldiers moving about on it. You will hear the sailors making all sorts of comments about this shot... " we killed two of 'em I think...look, they're being taken away...he'll get mad now and send one over here in a minute..." and indeed, a few moments later you will see a flash of lightning and a cloud of smoke; the sentinel standing on the breastwork will bark "can-n-on!" and a ball will fly past you and strike the ground with a thud throwing up a fountain of mud and stones.

Now, if your nerves are strong enough, pass through the door on your left, into the room where wounds are dressed and operations are performed. There you will see surgeons with their arms bespattered with blood up to the elbows, their faces pale and stern, engaged at something at a cot upon which a wounded man is lying under the influence of chloroform. His eyes are wide open and he is muttering incoherently as if in delirium, sometimes uttering simple words of endearment. The surgeons are engaged in the revolting but beneficent task of amputating a limb. You see the sharp curved knife pierce the white healthy flesh; you hear the wounded man suddenly come to with a frightful bloodcurdling scream and a volley of oaths, and you see the feldsher throw the amputated limb into a corner... You will see war not as a splendid array of troops in excellent formation, with music and beating of drums, fluttering colours and generals on prancing steeds, but war in its true aspect - blood, suffering and death...

Leo Tolstoy Tales from Sevastopol
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