Zurab Tsereteli, the president of the Russian Academy of Arts best known for a statue of Peter the Great in Moscow and a 9/11 memorial in Bayonne, New Jersey, has plans to design a monument to commemorate the 224 victims of the Russian Metrojet plane that crashed on 31 October in Sinai, Egypt after an apparent terrorist bombing.
Tsereteli told Russia’s LifeNews television channel that he accepted a request from Russia’s Union of Youth to create the sculpture and will do it for free if his proposal is approved. The monument is due to be installed somewhere in St Petersburg, where most of the victims were from, although there is some debate over whether it should be put up at Pulkovo Airport, the downed flight’s destination.
The artist compared the Sinai memorial to his ten-storey-high Tear of Grief monument in New Jersey, which honours the victims of the 11 September attacks and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. “So, it seems I already have experience in this respect, and now another such tragedy has taken place in St Petersburg,” he told LifeNews.