Description of the attraction
On April 12, 1961, near the city of Engels, Saratov region, residents of the village of Smelovka heard an explosion in the sky and saw two parachutes descending to the ground. The villagers then did not even suspect that they had witnessed a historical event on a global scale. Now April 12 is World Cosmonautics Day.
Piloted by Yuri Gagarin, the Vostok spacecraft completed the first flight into space in the history of mankind, for which the cosmonaut was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. The landing site of the world's first cosmonaut Gagarin on the Saratov land was more than symbolic; six years earlier, he graduated with honors from the Saratov Industrial College.
In 1965, an obelisk in the form of a rocket taking off with a height of 27 meters was installed at the landing site. In 1981, a sculptural monument to Yuri Gagarin was erected on a pedestal in front of the obelisk. Over time, an alley was planted around the monument and the architectural complex "Gagarinskoe Pole" was created, which made it possible to include the landing site of the first cosmonaut in tourist routes.
In 2011, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the first manned flight into space, a memorial "Gallery of Cosmonautics" was opened at the landing site. In addition to the main attraction: the soaring rocket and the monument to Gagarin, the memorial complex includes a composition dedicated to the founder of cosmonautics K. E. Tsiolkovsky and the designer of domestic rocketry S. P. Korolev, as well as bas-relief portraits of 12 cosmonauts. These cosmonauts, one way or another, were the first in space exploration: German Titov, Valentina Tereshkova, Konstantin Feoktistov, Pavel Popovich, Valery Kubasov, Gennady Sarafanov, Vladimir Kovalenok, Vladimir Komarov, Svetlana Savitskaya, Sergey Krikalev, Alexei Leonov, and Yuri Shargin.
