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The training ship of the Argentine Navy "Libertad" on the Russian banknote



This is the most famous monument of Peter the Great with the view of the Arkhangelsk port depicted on the front of a 500 ruble banknote. One may also see a three-masted sailing ship - barque "Sedov" on the background, it is said to arrive to Arkhangelsk in 1984 for the 400th anniversary of the city.

Central Bank of Russia states that reprinted in 2010 paintings on banknotes represent a collective image of ships made by Igor Krylkov, official artist of Goznak (State Administration for the Issue of Bank Notes)

However, Igor Krylkov admits that Initially, he painted a modern steamer near the river port but at the last moment, the Central Bank said that the steamer did not fit with the general idea of the banknote. Then the artist urgently found a photo of the first sailing ship he saw on his desk and redrew the sketch. It was the Argentine naval training ship called Libertad, which has never entered Russian waters. In 1995, the 500,000 ruble banknote was the first with the image of this sailing ship. After the denomination (1998), the design also went to the updated banknote with a denomination of 500 rubles (they did not have enough 3 years to correct the "historical truth").



"Libertad" is a steel-hulled, full-rigged, class "A" sailing ship that serves as a school vessel in the Argentine Navy. One of the largest and fastest tall ships in the world, holder of several speed records, was designed and built in the 1950s by the Río Santiago Shipyard, Ensenada, Argentina. Her maiden voyage was in 1961, and she continues to be a training ship with yearly instruction trips for the graduating naval cadets as well as a traveling goodwill ambassador, having covered more than 800,000 nautical miles (1,500,000 km.) across all seas, visited about 500 ports in more than 60 countries, and trained more than 11,000 navy graduates.
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