Qualla: Memorial of Glory

Memorial of Glory: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0. The flame never goes out. It burns at the foot of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Tiraspol's Suvorov Square, and it was lit by a man who had seen the war it commemorates, a Hero of the Soviet Union named Mikhail Kharin. Around that flame gathers one of the most layered war memorials in the region, a place that honors not one conflict but three, spanning half a century of loss. Soldiers of the Second World War, of the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, and of the brief, bitter Transnistria War of the early 1990s are all remembered here, their names and their machines assembled into a single act of collective mourning.

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Image: Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada | CC BY-SA 2.0

Memorial of Glory: The Ground Beneath the Monument

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NAC, CC BY-SA 4.0. This corner of Tiraspol was significant long before the memorial rose. In the 1920s, a square already occupied the site, and during the Russian Civil War the cavalry commander Grigory Kotovsky was buried here after the city was taken from the White forces. The decision to build a...

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Image: NAC | CC BY-SA 4.0

Memorial of Glory: A Tank With a Father's Grief

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicolai_Chirnev, CC BY-SA 4.0. Among the memorial's centerpieces stands a T-34-85 tank, and it carries a story that turns a machine of war into something almost unbearably human. The tank had been the combat vehicle of Lieutenant Boris Sergeev, who fought alongside his father, Vasily Antonovich Sergeev, a colo...

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Image: Nicolai_Chirnev | CC BY-SA 4.0

Memorial of Glory: Names Carved After the Newest War

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ivo Kruusamägi, CC BY-SA 3.0. The memorial kept receiving the dead. Its last burials came in 1992, during the Transnistria War, and among them was Nikolai Ostapenko, a local council head killed in an attack that April. In 1995 a monument was added for the soldiers lost in the Soviet-Afghan War. When the compl...

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Image: Ivo Kruusamägi | CC BY-SA 3.0