MOSCOW, August 7 (R-Sport) – On its record-breaking journey across Russia’s vast territory, the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics torch relay will visit the remote, northwestern Plesetsk space center and the country’s largest power plant at the Sayano-Shushenskaya dam in south-central Siberia, organizing committee officials announced Wednesday.
Those are among the 11 natural, historic and cultural sites the organizing committee identified as pit stops on the torch relay’s 65,000-km route.
The relay loops through more than 2,900 towns in Russia’s 83 regions, spiraling out from Moscow on October 7 before heading to the Kamchatka Peninsula, down to Vladivostok and west toward Sochi through southern Siberia.
The organizing committee on Wednesday also announced stops at Yasnaya Polyana, the estate about 200 km south of Moscow where Leo Tolstoy wrote “War and Peace;” a kimberlite pipeline in the Sakha republic; the Buddhist Ivolginsky temple near Ulan-Ude in the Buryatia republic; the Curonian Spit, a sliver of sand dune shared by Russian Kaliningrad and Lithuania; the 9th-century Ryurikovo Fort in the Novgorod Region; Kizhi, an island settlement in Karelia dating back to the 15th century; the 16th-century Tobolsk Kremlin in Siberia’s Tyumen Region; and ski resorts at Sheregesh in the Keremevo Region and Dombay in the Karachay-Cherkess republic.
Kizhi and the Curonian Spit are designated UNESCO World Heritage sites.
