旅人る - Tabibito

 

Vonlyarovo, Katyn

 

Vonlyarovo

A village in Smolensk oblast. Until the Russian Revolution, it belonged to a noble family with a really unpronounceable surname of Vonlyarlyarsky. Their manor is gone but the church of Alexander Nevsky (1853) is standing. Actually nothing more to see here.

 

Katyn

A memorial to 4,400 Polish military officers killed by Soviet secret police in 1940 and buried in this forest as well as nearly 6,500 victims of Great Purge. The Polish cemetery was opened in 2000 and had an outstanding design for that time with victims names engraved on rusty plates and windy pedestrian walks in the pine forest. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Polish authorities could no longer send personnel to maintain the memorial as before. Only three years without good care and the memorial lost all its luster: the concrete crumbled, the metal plates were smudged with lime, and in some places they even began to fall off.

 

Recently, someone even came to the graves of two generals Smoravinsky and Bogatyrevich, left a flag and an artificial bouquet.

 

The Russian part of the memorial. The signs here were made from something less rusty.

 

A new eco-trail has been laid from the new memorial, which goes deep into the forest and ends at a dead end.

 

Getting in (as of April 2023): both Vonlyarovo and Katyn are located close to the road from Smolensk to Vitebsk. Getting by car is advised.

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