Commemorative events dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the sinking of the nuclear submarine “Kursk” will be held in the Northern capital on 12 August. This was reported by the St. Petersburg club of submariners and veterans of the Navy.
The club said that at 12:00 a memorial service for the dead will be held at the Nikolo-Epiphany Naval Cathedral, and at 14:00 at the Serafimovskoye cemetery near the memorial, a funeral meeting will take place, during which flowers will be laid at the memorial and at the graves of the submariners and military honors will be given dead sailors.
More than 50 families of those killed in the Kursk are currently living in St. Petersburg. 32 crew members and its commander, Hero of Russia, Captain 1st Rank Gennady Lyachin were buried at the Serafimovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg. This is the largest crew burial in Russia, according to the club’s website.
The memorial at the Serafimovskoye cemetery was opened on the third anniversary of the death of the Kursk on August 12, 2003. The central sculpture of the memorial is a black granite cube with a bronze figure of a petrel above it. On one side of the pedestal the phrase “In memory of the Kursk crew” and the coordinates of the place where the submarine sank are engraved, on the other side there is a line from the suicide note of Lieutenant-Commander Dmitry Kolesnikov, who died on the submarine, “There is no need to despair.”
The submarine “Kursk” sank in 2000 in the Barents Sea at a depth of 108 m. There were 118 crew members on board, all of whom died. The cause of the death of the submarine was the explosion of a torpedo in the bow compartment of the submarine.