Joseph (Osip) Mikhailovich Deribas (September 24, 1751 - December 14, 1800) The first statue of Joseph de Ribas in Odessa appeared in 1900. The monument was a granite column on which stood the empress, and at the foot of the column on four sides stood her bronze companions - Grigory Potemkin, Platon Zubov, Franz de Volan and Joseph de Ribas. In the first Odessa May Day 1920 workers came to the community work day - and the monument was destroyed. However, the figures of the Companions were not lost, but were kept in the historical museum of local lore. In 2007, the monument to Catherine, which is an exact copy of the original, with the figure of de Ribas was restored. On the day of the bicentenary of Odessa - September 2, 1994 - a bronze monument was opened to Joseph Mikhailovich at the very beginning of Deribasovskaya Street. To emphasize De Ribas’s first-built mission, the Odessa sculptor Alexander Knyazik portrayed a young man with a shovel in one hand and a detailed plan of the city in the other.
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