Opposite the Kirillo-Afanasievsky Monastery, a magnificent park with linden-lined alleys and neat paths has been laid out. In its center stands the famous Demidovsky Pillar, a monument to Pavel Demidov, the founder of the first university in Yaroslavl.
The current pillar is a reconstruction of the monument destroyed after the revolution. Originally, it was a 12-meter bronze column standing on a granite pedestal and topped with a celestial sphere and a double-headed eagle.
The money for it was raised, as they say, by the whole community, through voluntary donations from the townspeople. In the end, once the necessary sum had been collected, the monument was solemnly unveiled in March 1829. But almost 100 years later, the revolutionaries began actively getting rid of any symbols of autocracy that in any way recalled tsarist Russia.
First they removed the double-headed eagle and the celestial sphere from the monument, and then they decided to dismantle it altogether and use it for the needs of industrialization. However, it turned out that the bronze column was hollow and filled with sand inside for stability, so they never derived much benefit from it.
In 2004, the Museum of the History of Yaroslavl initiated the restoration of the monument on its old site. The city authorities supported this proposal and allocated more than 20 million rubles from the budget. By December 2005, the tallest monument in the city, the Demidovsky Pillar, had once again appeared in the center of Yaroslavl. It looks the same as the previous one, only now the column is made of ultra-strong concrete.
