Mohyla Miru, the trilingual tourist information placards tell us, translates as Tumulus of Peace. The difficult thing about translating into a language that is not your native one is that your dictionary tells you what a word means, but does not tell you whether it's formal, informal, used only by nerds, or completely obscure. Someone's dictionary told him that mohyla means tumulus, and he wrote it down. I asked Corinne, who told me that a tumulus is a lot like a cairn. This was very helpful to me. We sometimes argue, during Scrabble for instance, about words, chiefly Scottish in origin, which are known only to people who have spent thousands upon thousands of hours of their lives reading fantasy novels and Victorian literature, which I have not.
The building is a small chapel built in 1912 as a monument to the battle of Austerlitz, fought in the winter of 1805 by the Russian, Austrian, and Moravian armies against Napoleon. The battle took place, and this monument stands, on a hill about 10 minutes from the village where we live. After Napoleon's victory, the Austrian army surrendered, and the Russians signed some sort of a non-aggression pact. Napoleon later chose to ignore the pact and marched into Moscow anyway.
The battle of Austerlitz figured heavily in the development of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Since I spent a couple of months straight thinking about him for my senior essay at St. John's, it is of particular interest to me. |
