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People > Photos > Gallery: Galina Subacheva > Album: Irkutsk > Shelikhov, the discoverer and explorer of Alaska
Shelikhov, the discoverer and explorer of Alaska

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Date: 05/19/05

Tags:

bay book coast golden grave horn marble memorial portrait pyramid sign sword time

Behind the apse of Znamensky Convent in Irkutsk lies the grave of Grigori Shelikhov (1749-1795), merchant, traveller and seafarer. He was also one of the founders of the Russian-American Company, a trading firm set up in Russia with an end to assimilating the territories of Russian America. This was the name of the Russian domains in Alaska from the latter half of the 18th century to the latter half of the 19th century, the Aleutian Islands and the north-west coast of North America as far as the 54°40’ northern latitude were called. In his lifetime Shelikhov published a book about his travels entitled “The Travels of the Russian Merchant Grigori Shelikhov from Okhotsk Across the Eastern Ocean to the Shores of America”. His name was given to a bay in the Okhotsk Sea, a strait between the Peninsula of Alaska and Kadiak Island where in 1784 he founded the first Russian settlements and to a town in the lrkutsk Region. The memorial erected over his grave in 1800 is a colourful tribute to his life and work: a five-meter-high pyramid with a bas-relief inscribed with the portrait and various symbolical drawings narrating the life and deeds of the seafaring merchant including a sword as a sign of nobility (for he was awarded a golden sword), a horn of plenty symbolizing wealth, a cracked column and scythe symbolizing untimely death, and nautical maps, an hour glass, anchor and ropes, packages of goods and others representing his voyages. Two illustrious Russian poets of the late 18th and early 19th century, Gavriil Derzhavin and Ivan Dmitriev, wrote the texts and verses for the memorial which, as it were, complement and add to the biography begun by the marble bas .