Welcome!
Welcome to the online home of "Go Minsk" organization. We have our headquarters in Minsk. We would like to say some words about our hometown.
Minsk is a unique place...
One can
never imagine such an eclecticism as, say, a cathedral beside a post-war Stalinist Ampire palace or a church near an administrative
building! Minsk offers the opportunity to see the
unbelievable with one's own eyes. Minsk might be the
only city on the Earth to retain the styles from every period of its history, the
examples of which stand side by side and have been built in different time periods from the Renaissance to communism in Belarus established during Russian occupation of the eastern part of the present-day Belarus including its capital Minsk in 1917-1991 (the western part of the present-day Belarus with such cities as Hrodna and Brest-Litoŭsk belonged to Poland until 1939). It's a city full of still unrevealed truth and mysteries. It's a city of an experiment - as the Russians wanted to distort the sense of identity among the Belarusians, to stop them feel belonging to the Belarusian nation and to "convert" them into Russian culture, by destroying old architecture and creating Minsk so that it matched Moscow and Soviet Russia's lifestyle. Still, the Belarusians managed to preserve at least some of the original architecture, though one must defenitely not go to Minsk if one is seeking for a bunch of old churches and cathedrals. On should go to Hrodna (a Belarusian city on the Polish border) in that case. Minsk is worth visiting to feel its spirit of "architectural tolerance" and to see the city many renowned commies like Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin would have been dreaming to live in.
Can a modern building match an old orthodox church or an old 19th-century house? You doubt that!
I don't... Enjoy staying online on my website!
Dzima Bartalievič, the coordinator of the webproject