The Great Union Monument (Monumentul Marii Uniri) is a white-marble memorial in Piața Națiunii in Iași, in front of the Grigore T. Popa University of Medicine and Pharmacy. Sculpted by Constantin Crengăniș between 1995 and 1999, it reconstructs an earlier monument by Princess Olga Sturdza that commemorated the creation of Greater Romania in 1918.
Olga Sturdza, who was herself a sculptor as well as a prominent organizer of aid for war orphans, donated the original monument to the city in 1924. Carved in Vienna from a single block of white marble, the five-meter-high group was unveiled in May 1927 along Bulevardul Carol I at the foot of Copou Hill, close to the site of the present Mihai Eminescu Central University Library. At its center, the Motherland is represented with the features of Queen Marie, embracing three young women personifying Transylvania, Basarabia, and Bucovina, while a smaller child represents Romanians who remained outside the borders of the enlarged country. The monument was removed in 1940 and later destroyed, while the Statue of Mihai Eminescu took its place in 1957.
Plans to recreate Olga Sturdza’s lost monument began in the 1990s, and Constantin Crengăniș reconstructed the group from surviving historical photographs between 1995 and 1999. The new version, approximately 5.5 meters high, was unveiled on December 1, 1999 in the newly arranged Piața Națiunii. Its position at the center of a map of Greater Romania marked out in reddish paving extends the symbolism of the sculptural group into the surrounding square.
