In 1961, Yuri Gagarin’s legendary space flight lasted just 108 minutes. A monument in Belgrade to the first person in space did not last much longer, being swiftly dismantled after causing online hilarity owing to its curiously small head.
On Sunday, a number of Serbian websites noticed that a monument to the cosmonaut had appeared on a street in the Serbian capital that beared his name. The large plinth and the small bust of Gagarin’s head prompted the website Noizz to quip: “The only way you can see it clearly is to launch yourself into the sky.”
The monument’s unfortunate proportions prompted a barrage of online sarcasm and inspired an array of parodies, including the following tweet.
— Šesta kolona (@haarppp) April 9, 2018
The official unveiling was to take place on Thursday, Serbian media reported, but on Tuesday the monument was dismantled. A video published online showed a man climbing up a ladder and unceremoniously wrenching the undersized head from its plinth.
Goran Vesic, a city official, said a new monument would be commissioned and would be vetted by all relevant institutions before installation. “Gagarin will have a memorial in Belgrade worthy of the contribution that he has made to humanity,” he said in a statement reported by the wesbite B92.net.
There are dozens of monuments to Gagarin across the former Soviet Union. A town in western Russia close to his birthplace was renamed Gagarin in 1968 after the cosmonaut’s death in a plane crash.
