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Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (32) By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe

By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe posted 12-14-2021 04:10

  
Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (32):
A Tear for the Pulkovo Observatory
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poem-essay) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design) 
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Mikhail Lomonosov - who discovered the atmosphere of Venus in 1761 -, Friedrich Georg Wilhelm von Struve - the first director of the Pulkovo Observatory in 1839 and the creator of the Struve Geodetic Arc (almost 3,000 km long, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea) -, Otto Wilhelm von Struve - another exceptional astronomer… I thought of them in October 2020, when I visited the Russian Church in Bucharest, which was made in 1909 with the support of the Russian Tsar and inspired by the fascinating Church of Saint Basil, made in Moscow by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century.
(It is to say that the Russian Orthodox Church was founded in 998; it separated from the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the 15th century and, after the Fall of Constantinople, claimed the position of protector of Eastern Christianity.)
I also thought of the tragic moments in the history of the magnificent Pulkovo Observatory: in the 1930s many of its astronomers were executed by the Soviet regime, and in 1940s it was bombed by the Nazi regime.
Maybe Boris Gerasimovich and the other martyrs of astronomy should be commemorated annually, together with the classic martyr Giordano Bruno, by the whole world!
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I then looked at the spires of the Russian Church in Bucharest
and they seemed like planets orbiting the Sun,
while the Moon seemed out of the system,
testing the best celestial place for observations.
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#poetry
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