The maintenance of the so-called Eternal Flame at memorials, monuments, graves and other sacred symbols came from antiquity, when priests of various cults symbolically lit the sacred flame. This tradition was adopted by contemporaries, honoring with its help the memory of unknown soldiers and heroes who fell in the Great Patriotic War.
History
For the first time in the new history of the world, the Eternal Flame was lit at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris, near the Arc de Triomphe. The fire appeared in the memorial two years after its grand opening, after which the French sculptor Gregoire Calvet proposed to place it in a special gas burner. With this device, the flame really became the Eternal - now it illuminated the tomb, not only during the day, but also at night.
Since 1923, the Eternal Flame at the French Memorial has been lit daily and with the participation of World War II veterans.
The tradition of lighting the Eternal Flame was adopted by many states that created city and national monuments - in memory of the soldiers who died in the First World War. So, in the 1930s-1940s, the Eternal Flame caught fire in the Czech Republic, Romania, Portugal, Canada, the USA and Belgium. Then it was lit by Poland, thus perpetuating the memory of the fallen heroes of World War II, and in Berlin they went even further and installed a prism of glass with inside fire burning over the remains of an unknown German soldier and an unknown victim of concentration camps.
