SEVASTOPOL, June 17. /TASS/. The restoration of the Siege of Sevastopol panorama, damaged in a Ukrainian attack, could take from four months to three years, Mikhail Smorodkin, director of the Museum-Reserve of the Heroic Defense and Liberation of Sevastopol, said.
"A special board of artists will be assembled and a group will be selected to oversee the restoration. At first, we relied on the experience of Soviet artists who restored this painting after 1942, after a fire blew through it. A group of about 19 people worked, and it took them three years to restore it," Smorodkin told reporters.
"Later I talked to my colleagues from the Grekov Studio. The painting of the Battle of Borodino panorama, which was damaged by fire, took four months to restore. So we have four months and three years, we are looking at this timeline."
Ukraine struck the museum with a drone on June 10 and burned it almost to the ground. Fire extinguishing efforts damaged the painting further.
Yekaterina Malinovskaya, head of the department "History of the Crimean War of 1853-1856" at the museum, said 16 fragments of the panorama had been examined, 13 of them have a plot part.
