The "cow of peace" that drifted down from the North during a flood has been laid to rest at Aegibong in Gimpo, where the land of its northern hometown is visible.
The Gimpo Cultural Foundation in Gyeonggi Province said on the 3rd that on the 29th it moved the cow of peace's urn from the Tongjin Dure Cultural Center to the exhibition hall at Aegibong Peace Ecological Park.
From the window of the Aegibong Peace Ecological Park exhibition hall, you can see Yudo, the uninhabited island in Gimpo where the cow of peace was first found in 1996, as well as scenery from Gaepung County in North Korea 1.4 kilometers away.
The cow of peace drifted down from the North during the great flood of July 1996 and was found on Yudo, an uninhabited island in Gimpo that lies in the inter-Korean neutral zone.
With permission from the Ministry of National Defense and the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission, the Marine Corps Blue Dragon Unit rescued the cow. The rescue was given an operation name, and the name was "Owl."
At the time, the cow had stepped on a land mine and its left ankle was broken, but it recovered after treatment, and the following year it even held a wedding after taking a Jeju cow as its "South Korean bride."
The cow rescued from Yudo was given the name "cow of peace," and the Jeju cow was called the "cow of unification wishes." The cow of peace, which had seven calves with its mate, died of natural causes in 2006.
This Aegibong enshrinement comes about 20 years after the cow of peace passed away. Before the urn transfer, the Tongjin Dure Nori Preservation Association, a Gyeonggi Province intangible cultural heritage group, also held a funeral rite near Aegibong on the 27th.
Kang Gyeong-gu, head of the Tongjin Dure Nori Preservation Association and former Gimpo mayor, said, "I hope the cow of peace, regarded as a symbol of the pain of division and of peace, will become an apostle of peace in the skies over Aegibong."