WATCH THE VIDEO OF THE BENCH BEING MADE
| The Bench of Friendship
was designed, and primarily crafted, by Alexei Kobikov, Master Blacksmith
and owner of the Kovgrad Forge in Pervouralsk in the central Ural
Mountains of Siberia. The project, however, has been open to all who've
wanted to participate and their participation has been vital.
Alexei's friends, apprentices, and
neighbors came night after night
when the forge closed for the day and reopened from 5 until midnight to
complete the bench. Even one of the local policemen asked to be able to
put in several blows on the bench. The bench was completed February 25, 2008. Work on it began in August 2007—the same month, exactly 200 years after Thomas Jefferson and Tsar Alexander I began the process to forging diplomatic ties between our nations. See time line: http://www.accesstoideas.org/timeline.html Nikolai Arzhannikov, co-founder of Access to Ideas, has been instrumental in the project since its inception, helping the artists locate and purchase the highest quality materials for the bench, finding his way through a maze of paperwork needed to ship the bench to America, coordinating all the interviews and publicity the bench has garnered in Russia, working with the U.S. Consulate in Ekaterinburg (who has thrown its wholehearted support behind the project), and helping to find the right home for the bench in America. Now, the hardest step of all, is working out the details of the bench's journey across Russia and to America. See: www.accesstoideas.org/Benchmarks.html The bench constitutes 10,000 hammer blows and 100,000 hopes and prayers silently uttered. It is more than a gift. It is a symbol of that longing of the human heart for normalcy and humanity among people and nations.
The bench was placed
in the Main Square of Pervouralsk on March 2, 2007—Election |
