Kronstadt
Kronstadt spelled Kronshtadt, Cronstadt or Kronštádt is an early 18th-century foundation which became an important international centre of commerce whose trade role was eclipsed by the growth of its strategic significance in the ensuing centuries as the primary maritime defence outpost of the former Russian capital. It is now the port city in Kronshtadtsky District of the federal city of Saint Petersburg, located on Kotlin Island, 30 kilometers west of Saint Petersburg, near the head of the Gulf of Finland, it is linked to the former Russian capital by a combination levee-causeway-seagate, the St Petersburg Dam, part of the city's flood defences, which acts as road access to Kotlin island from the mainland. In March 1921, the island city was the site of the Kronstadt rebellion; the main base of the Russian Baltic Fleet was located in Kronstadt guarding the approaches to Saint Petersburg. The historic centre of the city and its fortifications are part of the World Heritage Site, Saint Petersburg and Related Groups of Monuments.
Kronstadt has been a place of pilgrimage for Orthodox Christians for many years due to the memory of Saint John of Kronstadt. Kronstadt was founded by Peter the Great, whose Imperial Russian forces took the island of Kotlin from the Swedes during the Great Northern War in 1703; the first fortifications were inaugurated on 18 May 1704. These fortifications, known as Kronshlot, were constructed quickly. During the winter the Gulf of Finland freezes over completely. Under the command of Governor-general Alexander Danilovich Menshikov, workers used thousands of frames made of oak logs filled with stones which were carried by horses across the frozen sea, placed in cuttings made in the ice. Thus, several new small islands were created, forts were erected on them closing access to Saint-Petersburg by sea. Only two narrow navigable channels remained, with forts guarding them. One of the first Governors of Kronstadt was a veteran of the Royal Scots Navy, Admiral Thomas Gordon, a refugee in Russia from the Scottish union with England and became Commander-in-chief from 1727 to 1741.
Just as Kronstadt became populated and fortified, it attracted merchants from maritime powers most notably, the Dutch, the British and the Germans through the old Hanse connections. The community of British merchants or "factors" came to be known as the English Factory, despite the fact that many of them were Scots, they settled both in Kronstadt and in St Petersburg itself and for a time dominated both inward and outward trade in the reign of Catherine the Great. They became an integral part of British trade and foreign policy through the Board of Trade in London. A number of the British settlers became naturalised Russians. Trading alliances were interrupted by the outbreak of the Crimean War. Kronstadt was refortified in the 19th century; the old three-decker forts, five in number, which constituted the principal defences of the place and had resisted the Anglo-French fleets during the Crimean War, became of secondary importance. From the plans of Eduard Totleben a new fort and four batteries were constructed to defend the principal approach, seven batteries to cover the shallower northern channel.
All these fortifications were low and thickly armoured earthworks with heavy Krupp guns on their ramparts. The city is surrounded by an enceinte. In summer 1891, the French fleet was received in Kronstadt, it was a first step towards the forthcoming Franco-Russian Alliance. During the Petrograd riots of the February revolution, the sailors of Petrograd joined the revolution and executed their officers, thus gaining a reputation as dedicated revolutionaries. During the civil war, the sailors participated on the red side, until 1921, when they rebelled against Bolshevik rule. Kronstadt with its supporting forts and minefields was key in protecting Petrograd from foreign forces. Despite this, the cruiser Oleg was torpedoed and sunk by a small motor boat after participating in the bombardment of Krasnaya Gorka fort that had revolted against the Bolsheviks; this was followed on August 18, 1919, by a raid of seven Royal Navy Coastal Motor Boats inside the harbour of Kronstadt itself, damaging the Soviet battleships Petropavlovsk and Andrei Pervozvanny, sinking a submarine supply ship, the Pamiat Azova.
In 1921, a group of naval officers and men, together with soldiers and civilian supporters, rebelled against the Bolshevik government in Soviet Kronstadt. The garrison had been a centre of major support for the Bolsheviks, throughout the Civil War of 1917–1921, the naval forces at Kronstadt had been at the vanguard of the main Bolshevik attacks, their demands included freedom of speech, the end of deportation to work camps, a change in Soviet war politics, liberation of the soviets from "party control". After brief negotiations, Leon Trotsky responded by sending the army to Kronstadt, along with the Cheka; the uprising was thus suppressed. In the late 1930s, the fortified city became the base of the Soviet Baltic Fleet. During that time it was an important training centre for the Soviet navy; the Kronstadt naval dockyard overhauled and repaired surface ships and submarines for the Baltic Fleet. All forts and batteries of the city were reconstructed. At 23:37 on June 21, 1941, fleet operational readiness Number 1 was announced by Baltic Fleet Commander Vice Admiral V. Tributs on the order of the People's Commissar of the Navy Admiral N.
G. Kuznetsov. Several ho
Cape of Good Hope
The Cape of Good Hope is a rocky headland on the Atlantic coast of the Cape Peninsula in South Africa. A common misconception is; this misconception was based on the misbelief that the Cape was the dividing point between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Contemporary geographic knowledge instead states the southernmost point of Africa is Cape Agulhas about 150 kilometres to the east-southeast; the currents of the two oceans meet at the point where the warm-water Agulhas current meets the cold-water Benguela current and turns back on itself. That oceanic meeting point fluctuates between Cape Point; when following the western side of the African coastline from the equator, the Cape of Good Hope marks the point where a ship begins to travel more eastward than southward. Thus, the first modern rounding of the cape in 1488 by Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias was a milestone in the attempts by the Portuguese to establish direct trade relations with the Far East. Dias called the cape Cabo das Tormentas, the original name of the "Cape of Good Hope".
As one of the great capes of the South Atlantic Ocean, the Cape of Good Hope has long been of special significance to sailors, many of whom refer to it as "the Cape". It is a waypoint on the Cape Route and the clipper route followed by clipper ships to the Far East and Australia, still followed by several offshore yacht races; the term Cape of Good Hope is used in three other ways: It is a section of the Table Mountain National Park, within which the cape of the same name, as well as Cape Point, falls. Prior to its incorporation into the national park, this section constituted the Cape Point Nature Reserve, it was the name of the early Cape Colony established by the Dutch on the Cape Peninsula. Just before the Union of South Africa was formed, the term referred to the entire region that in 1910 was to become the Cape of Good Hope Province. Eudoxus of Cyzicus was a Greek navigator for Ptolemy VIII, king of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, who found the wreck of a ship in the Indian Ocean that appeared to have come from Gades, rounding the Cape.
When Eudoxus was returning from his second voyage to India, the wind forced him south of the Gulf of Aden and down the coast of Africa for some distance. Somewhere along the coast of East Africa, he found the remains of the ship. Due to its appearance and the story told by the natives, Eudoxus concluded that the ship was from Gades and had sailed anti-clockwise around Africa, passing the Cape and entering the Indian Ocean; this inspired him to attempt a circumnavigation of the continent. Organising the expedition on his own account he set sail from Gades and began to work down the African coast; the difficulties were too great, he was obliged to return to Europe. After this failure he again set out to circumnavigate Africa, his eventual fate is unknown. Although some, such as Pliny, claimed that Eudoxus did achieve his goal, the most probable conclusion is that he perished on the journey. In the 1450 Fra Mauro map, the Indian Ocean is depicted as connected to the Atlantic. Fra Mauro puts the following inscription by the southern tip of Africa, which he names the "Cape of Diab", describing the exploration by a ship from the East around 1420: "Around 1420 a ship, or junk, from India crossed the Sea of India towards the Island of Men and the Island of Women, off Cape Diab, between the Green Islands and the shadows.
It sailed for 40 days in a south-westerly direction without finding anything other than wind and water. According to these people themselves, the ship went some 2,000 miles ahead until - once favourable conditions came to an end - it turned round and sailed back to Cape Diab in 70 days". "The ships called junks that navigate these seas carry four masts or more, some of which can be raised or lowered, have 40 to 60 cabins for the merchants and only one tiller. They can navigate without a compass, because they have an astrologer, who stands on the side and, with an astrolabe in hand, gives orders to the navigator". Fra Mauro explained that he obtained the information from "a trustworthy source", who traveled with the expedition the Venetian explorer Niccolò da Conti who happened to be in Calicut, India at the time the expedition left: "What is more, I have spoken with a person worthy of trust, who says that he sailed in an Indian ship caught in the fury of a tempest for 40 days out in the Sea of India, beyond the Cape of Soffala and the Green Islands towards west-southwest.
Thus one can believe and confirm what is said by both these and those, that they had therefore sailed 4,000 miles". Fra Mauro comments that the account of the expedition, together with the relation by Strabo of the travels of Eudoxus of Cyzicus from Arabia to Gibraltar through the southern Ocean in Antiquity, led him to believe that the Indian Ocean was not a closed sea and that Africa could be circumnavigated by her southern end; this knowledge, together with the map depiction of the African continent encouraged the Portuguese to intensify their effort to round the tip of Africa. I
Whitehead torpedo
The Whitehead torpedo was the first self-propelled or "locomotive" torpedo developed. It was perfected in 1866 by Robert Whitehead from a design conceived by Giovanni Luppis of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, it was driven by a three-cylinder compressed air engine invented and made by Peter Brotherhood. Many naval services procured the Whitehead torpedo including the US Navy; this early torpedo proved itself in combat during the Russo-Turkish War when, on January 16, 1878, the Turkish ship Intibah was sunk by Russian torpedo boats carrying Whiteheads, though this story has been disputed in one book. The term "torpedo" comes from the Torpedo fish, a type of ray that delivers an electric shock to stun its prey. During the 19th century, an anonymous officer of the Austrian Marine Artillery conceived the idea of using a small boat laden with explosives, propelled by a steam or an air engine and steered by cables to be used against enemy ships. Luppis had a model of the device built. Dissatisfied with the device, which he called the "coast-saver", Luppis turned to Robert Whitehead, who worked for Stabilimento Tecnico Fiumano, a factory in Fiume, present-day Croatia.
In about 1850 the Austrian Navy asked Whitehead to develop this design into a self-propelled underwater torpedo. Whitehead developed what he called the Minenschiff: an 11-foot long, 14-inch diameter torpedo propelled by compressed air and carrying an explosive warhead, with a speed of 7 knots and the ability to hit a target up to 700 yards away. In 1868, Whitehead introduced a solution to the stability problem for his torpedo: Pendulum-and-hydrostat control, contained in its Immersion Chamber; the Austrian Navy bought the manufacturing rights to the Whitehead torpedo in 1869. By 1870 Whitehead's torpedoes were running at 17 knots. Still, there remained the problem of course correction: returning the torpedo to its correct course after it had deviated due to wind or wave action; the solution was in the form of the gyroscope gear, patented by Ludwig Obry, the rights to, bought by Whitehead in 1896. In 1868, Whitehead offered two types of torpedoes to the world's navies: one was 11 feet, seven inches in length with a diameter of 14 inches.
It weighed 346 pounds and carried a 40-pound warhead. The other was 14 feet long with a 16-inch diameter, it carried a 60-pound warhead. Both models could do 8-10 knots with a range of 200 yards; the United States Navy started using the Whitehead torpedo in 1892 after an American company, E. W. Bliss, secured manufacturing rights; as manufactured for the US Navy, the Whitehead torpedo was divided into four sections: the head, the air flask, the after-body and the tail. The head contained the explosive charge of guncotton; the air flask was constructed from heavy forged steel. The other parts of the shell of the torpedo were made of thin sheet steel; the interior parts were constructed out of bronze. The torpedo was launched below the waterline from a tube, using air or gunpowder discharge. In 1871, the Royal Navy bought manufacturing rights, started producing the torpedo at the Royal Laboratories at Woolwich, England; the Royal Navy fitted the Whitehead torpedo from HMS Holland 1 onwards. The French, Italian, Russian navies soon followed suit and began acquiring the Whitehead torpedo.
By 1877, the Whitehead torpedo was attaining speeds of 18 mph for ranges of 830 yards. By the 1880s, more of the world's navies acquired the Whitehead and began deploying torpedo boats to carry them into battle and engineers began to envision submarines armed with Whitehead torpedoes. In 1904, British Admiral Henry John May commented, "but for Whitehead, the submarine would remain an interesting toy and little more"; the last known operational use of a Whitehead torpedo was during the Battle of Drøbak Sound in the early stages of World War II. Royal Navy Imperial German Navy French Navy Austro-Hungarian Navy Regia Marina Imperial Russian Navy Argentine Navy Belgian Navy Royal Danish Navy Hellenic Navy Portuguese Navy Chilean Navy Royal Norwegian Navy Swedish Navy United States Navy American 18 inch torpedo Schwartzkopff torpedo Bliss-Leavitt torpedo Howell torpedo Explanatory notes Citations
Yenisei River
The Yenisei Romanised Yenisey, Jenisej, is the largest river system flowing to the Arctic Ocean. It is the central of the three great Siberian rivers. Rising in Mongolia, it follows a northerly course to the Yenisei Gulf in the Kara Sea, draining a large part of central Siberia, the longest stream following the Yenisei-Angara-Selenga-Ider river system; the maximum depth of the Yenisei is 24 metres and the average depth is 14 metres. The depth of river outflow is 32 metres and inflow is 31 metres; the river flows through Tuva and the city of Krasnoyarsk. Its tributaries include Nizhnyaya Tunguska, Podkamennaya Tunguska and Tuba rivers; the 320-kilometre navigable Upper Angara River feeds into the northern end of Lake Baikal from the Buryat Republic but the largest inflow is from the Selenga which forms a delta on the southeastern side. The Yenisei River basin is home to 55 native fish species, including two endemics: Gobio sibiricus and Thymallus nigrescens; the grayling is restricted to its tributaries.
Most fish found in the Yenisei River basin are widespread Euro-Siberian or Siberian species, such as northern pike, common roach, common dace, Siberian sculpin, European perch and Prussian carp. The basin is home to many salmonids and the Siberian sturgeon; the Yenisei River valley is habitat for numerous flora and fauna, with Siberian pine and Siberian larch being notable tree species. In prehistoric times Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris, was abundant in the Yenisei River valley circa 6000 BC. There are numerous bird species present in the watershed, for example, the hooded crow, Corvus cornix; the Taimyr reindeer herd, a migrating tundra reindeer, the largest reindeer herd in the world, migrated to winter grazing ranges along the Yenisei River. River steamers first came to the Yenesei River in 1864 and were brought in from Holland and England across the icy Kara Sea. One was the SS Nikolai; the SS Thames attempted to explore the river, overwintered in 1876, but was damaged in the ice and wrecked in the river.
Success came with the steamers Frazer, Express in 1878, the next year, Moscow hauling supplies in and wheat out. The Dalman reached Yeneisisk in 1881. Imperial Russia placed river steamers on the massive river in an attempt to free up communication with land-locked Siberia. One boat was the SS St. Nicholas which took the future Tsar Nicholas II on his voyage to Siberia, conveyed Vladimir Lenin to prison. Engineers attempted to place river steamers on regular service on the river during the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway; the boats were needed to bring in the rails and supplies. Captain Joseph Wiggins sailed the Orestes with rail and parted out river steamers in 1893. However, the sea and river route proved difficult with several ships lost at sea and on the river. Both the Ob and Yenisei mouths feed into long inlets, several hundred miles in length, which are shallow, ice bound and prone to high winds and thus treacherous for navigation. After the completion of the railway, river traffic reduced only to local service as the Arctic route and long river proved much too indirect a route.
The first recreation team to navigate the Yenisei's entire length, including its violent upper tributary in Mongolia, was an Australian-Canadian effort completed in September 2001. Ben Kozel, Tim Cope, Colin Angus and Remy Quinter were on this team. Both Kozel and Angus wrote books detailing this expedition, a documentary was produced for National Geographic Television. A canal inclined plane was built on the river in 1985 at the Krasnoyarsk Dam. Nomadic tribes such as the Ket people and the Yugh people have lived along the banks of the Yenisei river since ancient times, this region is the location of the Yeniseian language family; the Ket, numbering about 1000, are the only survivors today of those who lived throughout central southern Siberia near the river banks. Their extinct relatives included the Kotts, Arins and Pumpokols who lived further upriver to the south; the modern Ket lived in the eastern middle areas of the river before being assimilated politically into Russia during the 17th through 19th centuries.
Some of the earliest known evidence of Turkic origins was found in the Yenisei Valley in the form of stelae, stone monoliths and memorial tablets dating from between the 7th and 9th centuries AD, along with some documents that were found in China's Xinjiang region. The written evidence gathered from these sources tells of battles fought between the Turks and the Chinese and other legends. There are examples of Uyghur poetry, though most have survived only in Chinese translation. Wheat from the Yenisei was sold by Muslims and Uighurs during inadequate harvests to Bukhara and Soghd during the Tahirid era. Russians first reached the upper Yenisei in 1605, travelling from the Ob River, up the Ket River and down the Yenisei as far as the Sym River. During World War II, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire agreed to divide Asia along a line that followed the Yenisei River to the border of China, along the border of China and the Soviet Union. Studies have shown that the Yenisei suffers from contamination caused by
Batumi
Batumi is the capital of Autonomous Republic of Adjara and the second-largest city of Georgia, located on the coast of the Black Sea in the country's southwest. It is situated in a Subtropical Zone at the foot of Caucasus. Much of Batumi's economy revolves around tourism and gambling, but the city is an important sea port and includes industries like shipbuilding, food processing and light manufacturing. Since 2010, Batumi has been transformed by the construction of modern high-rise buildings, as well as the restoration of classical 19th-century edifices lining its historic Old Town. Batumi is located on the site of the ancient Greek colony in Colchis called "Bathus" or "Bathys" – derived from. Under Hadrian, it was converted into a fortified Roman port and deserted for the fortress of Petra founded in the time of Justinian I. Garrisoned by the Roman-Byzantine forces, it was formally a possession of the kingdom of Lazica until being occupied by the Arabs, who did not hold it. From 1010, it was governed by the eristavi of the king of Georgia.
In the late 15th century, after the disintegration of the Georgian kingdom, Batumi passed to the princes of Guria, a western Georgian principality under the sovereignty of the kings of Imereti. A curious incident occurred in 1444 when a Burgundian flotilla, after a failed crusade against the Ottoman Empire, penetrated the Black Sea and engaged in piracy along its eastern coastline until the Burgundians under the knight Geoffroy de Thoisy were ambushed while landing to raid Vaty, as Europeans knew Batumi. De Thoisy was released through the mediation of the emperor John IV of Trebizond. In the 15th century in the reign of the prince Kakhaber Gurieli, the Ottoman Turks conquered the town and its district but did not hold them, they returned to it in force a century and inflicted a decisive defeat on the Georgian armies at Sokhoista. Batumi was recaptured by the Georgians several times, first in 1564 by prince Rostom Gurieli, who lost it soon afterwards, again in 1609 by Mamia II Gurieli. In 1723, Batumi again became part of the Ottoman Empire.
After the Turkish conquest Islamisation of the hitherto Christian region began but this was terminated and to a great degree reversed, after the area was re-annexed to Russian Imperial Georgia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78. It was the last Black Sea port annexed by Russia during the Russian conquest of that area of the Caucasus. In 1878, Batumi was annexed by the Russian Empire in accordance with the Treaty of San Stefano between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Occupied by the Russians on August 28, 1878, the town was declared a free port until 1886, it functioned as the center of a special military district until being incorporated in the Government of Kutaisi on June 12, 1883. On June 1, 1903, with the Okrug of Artvin, it was established as the region of Batumi and placed under the direct control of the General Government of Georgia; the expansion of Batumi began in 1883 with the construction of the Batumi-Tiflis-Baku railway and the finishing of the Baku-Batumi pipeline. Henceforth, Batumi became the chief Russian oil port in the Black Sea.
The town population increased doubling within 20 years: from 8,671 inhabitants in 1882 to 12,000 in 1889. By 1902 the population had reached 16,000, with 1,000 working in the refinery for Baron Rothschild's Caspian and Black Sea oil company. In the late 1880s and after, more than 7,400 Doukhobor emigrants sailed for Canada from Batumi, after the government agreed to let them emigrate. Quakers and Tolstoyans aided in collecting funds for the relocation of the religious minority, which had come into conflict with the Imperial government over its refusal to serve in the military and other positions. Canada settled them in Saskatchewan. During 1901, sixteen years prior to the October Revolution, Joseph Stalin, the future leader of the Soviet Union, lived in the city organizing strikes. On March 3, 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk gave the city back to the Ottoman Empire. Kemal Atatürk ceded the area to the Bolsheviks of the Soviet Union on the condition that it be granted autonomy, for the sake of the Muslims among Batumi's mixed population.
When Georgia gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1989, Aslan Abashidze was appointed head of Adjara's governing council and subsequently held onto power throughout the unrest of the 1990s. Whilst other regions, such as Abkhazia, attempted to break away from the Georgian state, Adjara remained as an integral part of the Republic's territory. Abashidze ruled the area as a personal fiefdom. In May 2004, he fled to Russia because of mass protests in Tbilisi sparked by the Rose Revolution. Batumi today is one of the main port cities of Georgia, it has the capacity for 80,000-ton tankers to take materials such as oil that are shipped through Georgia from Central Asia. Additionally, the city exports regional agricultural products. Since 1995 the freight conversion of the port has risen, with an approximate 8 million tons in 2001; the annual revenue from the port is estimated at between $200 million and $300 million. Since the change of power in Adjara, Batumi has attracted international investors, the
Black Sea Fleet
The Black Sea Fleet is the fleet of the Russian Navy in the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Mediterranean Sea. The fleet is considered to have been founded by Prince Potemkin on May 13, 1783. In 1918, the fleet was inherited by the Russian SFSR the Soviet Union in 1922, where it became part of the Soviet Navy. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Black Sea Fleet and most of its vessels were inherited by the Russian Federation; the Black Sea Fleet's official primary headquarters and facilities are located in the city of Sevastopol. The remainder of the fleet's facilities are based in various locations on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, including Krasnodar Krai, Rostov Oblast and Crimea; the current commander is Vice Admiral Aleksandr Moiseev, who has held the position since June 2018. The Black Sea Fleet is considered to have been founded by Prince Potemkin on May 13, 1783, together with its principal base, the city of Sevastopol. Commanded by such legendary admirals as Dmitriy Senyavin and Pavel Nakhimov, it is a fleet of enormous historical and political importance for Russia.
In 1790, Russian naval forces under the command of Admiral Fyodor Ushakov defeated the Turkish fleet at the Battle of Kerch Strait. From 1841 onward, the fleet was confined to the Black Sea by the London Straits Convention; as a result of the Crimean War, one provision of the Treaty of Paris was that the Black Sea was to be a demilitarized zone like the Island of Åland in the Baltic Sea, although Russia subsequently renounced the treaty and reconstituted its naval strength and fortifications in the Black Sea. The crew of the battleship Potemkin revolted in 1905 soon after the Navy's defeat in the Russo-Japanese War. Lenin wrote that the Potemkin uprising had had a huge importance in terms of being the first attempt at creating the nucleus of a revolutionary army. During World War I, there were a number of encounters between the Russian and Ottoman navies in the Black Sea; the Ottomans had the advantage due to their having under their command the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben, but after the two modern Russian dreadnoughts Imperatritsa Mariya and Imperatritsa Ekaterina Velikaya had been built in Mykolaiv, the Russians took command of the sea until the Russian government collapsed in November 1917.
German submarines of the Constantinople Flotilla and Turkish light forces would continue to raid and harass Russian shipping until the war's end. During the Russian Civil War, the vast majority of the Black Sea Fleet was scuttled by Bolsheviks in Novorossiysk. In 1919 out of the remnants of the Russian Imperial Fleet was established the Red Fleet of Ukraine which existed few months before a major advance of the Armed Forces of South Russia which occupied all the South and East Ukraine. Most of the ships became part of the "Russian Squadron" of Wrangl's armed forces and after the evacuation sailed to Tunisia. Out of those ships, some were passed to the French Navy and some were salvaged. Upon the defeat of the Armed Forces of South Russia, the Ukrainian National Army and the Polish Armed Forces in Ukraine the Soviet government signed a military union with the Russian SFSR transferring all the command to the Commander-in-chief of Russia. Few ships that did stay in Black Sea were salvaged in the 1920s, while a large scale new construction programme began in the 1930s.
Over 500 new ships were built during that period as well as massive expansion of coastal infrastructure took place. The Fleet was commanded by Vice Admiral F. S. Oktyabrskiy on the outbreak of war with Germany in June 1941; the Fleet gave a credible account of itself as it fought alongside the Red Army during the Siege of Odessa and the Battle of Sevastopol. In 1952, Turkey decided to join NATO, placing the Bosporus Strait in the Western sphere of influence. Together with the advent of long-range nuclear weapons, this decreased the strategic value of any naval activity in the Black Sea. In the post-war period, along with the Northern Fleet, the Black Sea Fleet provided ships for the 5th Operational Squadron in the Mediterranean, which confronted the United States Navy during the Arab-Israeli wars, notably during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. In 1988 Coastal Troops and Naval Aviation units of the Black Sea Fleet included: Danube Flotilla: 116th River Ship Brigade 112th Reconnaissance Ship Brigade 37th Rescue Ship Brigade Marine and Coastal Defense Forces Department 810th Marine Brigade 362nd independent Coastal Missile Regiment 138th independent Coastal Missile Regiment 417th independent Coastal Missile Regiment 51st independent Coastal Missile Regiment Naval Air Forces Department of the Black Sea Fleet 2nd Guards Maritime Missile Aviation Division (three regiments of maritime attack Tu-22M2s5th Maritime Missile Aviation Regiment - disbanded 15.11.94.
124th Maritime Missile Aviation Regiment - disbanded 1993. 943rd Maritime Missile Aviation Regiment - disbanded 1996. 30th independent Maritime Reconnaissance Aviation Regiment 318th independent Anti-Submarine Aviation Regiment 78th independent Shipborne Anti-Submarine Helicopter Regiment 8
1873 Vienna World's Fair
Weltausstellung 1873 Wien was the large world exposition, held in 1873 in the Austria-Hungarian capital of Vienna. Its motto was Kultur und Erziehung. There were 26,000 exhibitors housed in different buildings that were erected for this exposition, including the Rotunde, a large circular building in the great park of Prater designed by the Scottish engineer John Scott Russell; the Rotunde was destroyed by fire on 17 September 1937. The Russian pavilion had a naval section designed by Viktor Hartmann. Exhibits included models of the Illés Relief model of Jerusalem. Osman Hamdi Bey, an archaeologist and painter, was chosen by the Ottoman government as commissary of the empire's exhibits in Vienna, he organized the Ottoman pavilion with Victor Marie de Launay, a French-born Ottoman official and archivist, who had written the catalogue for the Ottoman Empire's exhibition at the 1867 Paris World's Fair. The Ottoman pavilion, located near the Egyptian pavilion, in the park outside the Rotunde, included small replicas of notable Ottoman buildings and models of vernacular architecture: a replica of the Sultan Ahmed Fountain in the Topkapı Palace, a model Istanbul residence, a representative Turkish bath, a cafe, a bazaar.
The 1873 Ottoman pavilion was more prominent than its pavilion in 1867. The Vienna exhibition set off Western nations' pavilions against Eastern pavilions, with the host, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, setting itself at the juncture between East and West. A report by the Ottoman commission for the exhibition expressed a goal of inspiring with their display "a serious interest on the part of the industrialists, traders and scholars of other nations...."The Ottoman pavilion included a gallery of mannequins wearing the traditional costumes of many of the varied ethnic groups of the Ottoman Empire. To supplement the cases of costumes, Osman Hamdi and de Launay created a photographic book of Ottoman costumes, the Elbise-i'Osmaniyye, with photographs by Pascal Sébah; the photographic plates of the Elbise depicted traditional Ottoman costumes, commissioned from artisans working in the administrative divisions of the Empire, worn by men and children who resembled the various ethnic and religious types of the empire, though the models were all found in Istanbul.
The photographs are accompanied by texts describing the costumes in detail and commenting on the rituals and habits of the regions and ethnic groups in question. The exhibition led to an intensive building activity in the years before; the new train station to Germany Nordwestbahnhof was completed just for example. Official website of the BIE Media related to Expo 1873 at Wikimedia Commons The Rotunda of the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition Images from the exhibition
Russian Empire
Imperial Russian Navy
