Portrait of Ivan Gannibal

"...Before whom amid the Chesme deeps
The mass of ships blazed up,
And Navarino fell for the first time."

So Pushkin wrote of the victories in the Russo-Turkish war won by his great-uncle, Ivan Abramovich Gannibal (1735-1801), the eldest of the 11 children of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, "the blackamoor of Peter the Great", and the Baltic German noblewoman Christina Matveyevna von Scheberg.

Ivan Gannibal took part in the first Russian landing in the Mediterranean and took the Greek town of Navarino by storm.

The formal portrait of the commander, general-in-chief and commander of the Black Sea Fleet Ivan Gannibal is by Dmitry Levitsky. Collection of the Pushkin Museum.

Gannibal is considered the founder of the city of Kherson: it was to him that, in 1778, the building of the fortress and the city was entrusted.

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Portrait of Ivan Gannibal

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