The Sedov barque, the world's largest traditional sailing ship in operation, is set to cover more than 10,000 nautical miles during an expedition to the North, which started on Friday.
The Northern Expedition 2010 marks the 65th anniversary of the end of the Great Patriotic War. The maritime institute students onboard the ship will lay flowers to the memorials of dead soldiers and participate in the commemorative events.
The expedition will last for more than five months and have two stages.
In the first stage, the barque will travel to Bergen, in Norway, to celebrate the country's national day. Then it will arrive in Oslo just when the Eurovision Song Contest will be held.
The next stop of the vessel will be Gothenburg, where it will mark Sweden's national day. The ship will later go to Helsinki, Stockholm and St. Petersburg.
The crew will take three capsules filled with earth from the north. Two will be given to veterans in St. Petersburg and Klaipeda, Lithuania, while the third will go to a museum in Murmansk.
The second stage of the expedition takes in the Norwegian city of Tromso, the Spitsbergen archipelago, and then Franz Josef Land, Severnaya Zemlya and Novaya Zemlya in the Arctic Ocean.
The ship will return to Murmansk in the middle of October.
The four-masted steel Sedov barque was built in 1921 in Germany. It was handed over to the Soviet Union as war reparation in 1945. The 118-meter long vessel, with a displacement of 7,300 tons, has a crew of 320 people.
MURMANSK, April 30 (RIA Novosti)
