Description
The image shows a monument located above the Vidraru Dam, in the shape of an adult, representing Prometheus, a character from Greek mythology, the titan who stole fire from Zeus, standing up, with his hands raised above his head, holding two lightning bolts in them.
The statue of Prometheus is also called the Monument of Electricity, the two lightnings caught in his hands representing the power coming from electricity discharged from the clouds in the sky.
The statue of the man is highlighted embossed, and the lightning bolts he carries in his hands, above, are rendered as two broken lines, horizontal and thickened, one on the left and one on the right side of the head.
The fingers with which he grabs the electricity derived from lightning are rendered in the center of each lightning, as a succession of short, elongated shapes, rounded at the ends and thickened.
The legs of the man in the statue are slightly apart and fixed on a pedestal, a higher concrete base, marked by a rectangle, at the bottom edge, embossed and horizontal.
Additional info
The statue was made by sculptor Constantin Popovici( 1938-1995) in 1965 and it shows Prometheus holding a flash of lightning as symbol of electricity.
In the Greek mythology, Prometheus is considered as one of the benefactors of humans since he gave them fire. Zeus bounds Prometheus to a rock on Mount Kazbek in Caucasus, where a huge eagle devours his liver every day which would then grow back overnight. Hercules kills the eagle and sets Prometheus free ending his ordeal.
In another story, Prometheus didn’t stop at offering fire to humans but also created them himself from clay and gave them life by using fire.
The statue of Prometheus (the Monument of Electricity) – Vidraru Dam is one of the most important tourist attractions in Wallachia, one that shouldn’t be missed.
This statue is 10 meters high and shows Prometheus with a thunderbolt in his hand as symbol of electricity and was made by sculptor Constantin Popovici in 1965 when the artist was only 27 years old.
The communist authorities wanted a statue of impressive size to be made in the same year of the creation of the Vidraru Dam. Grandiosity was in its place during those years. The statue was finished in only a few months.
The Monument of Electricity was closed for 3 years due to some works for improving visitors’ safety and reopened on April 15th this year.
Each year, the monument attracts tens of thousands of local and foreign visitors. The access to the statue is made after climbing a few hundreds of steps.
In 2012 the famous statue was taunted by Lonely Planet website. “Perhaps Eastern Europe’s most tongue-in-cheek Communist-era construction is at Romania’s Vidraru Dam, where a 10m statue of Prometheus (the man who stole fire from the gods) commemorates one of the Communist Bloc’s biggest hydroelectricity projects.” This is how Lonely Planet described the famous Vidraru statue in an article dedicated to the communist architecture in the Eastern Europe countries, titled “Brutal buildings: the architecture of Eastern Europe”.
Bibliography
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