Explore Belarus

Minsk

Belarus's vast capital is unlike any other European city — Stalin-era boulevards so wide they feel like runways, a pristine metro from 1977, and a street-art scene thriving in the gaps between granite ministries. The reconstructed Old Town Nemiga district and the Island of Tears war memorial add human weight to a city that otherwise wears its Soviet skin with strange pride.

Brest

Straddling the border with Poland, Brest is anchored by one of the most moving war memorials in Eastern Europe — the Brest Fortress, where Red Army soldiers held out for weeks against the German invasion of 1941. Beyond the citadel, the pedestrian Sovetskaya Street offers a gentler side: pavement cafés, an evening lamplighter who still lights gas lamps by hand, and leafy parks stretching to the Bug River.

Hrodna

Grodno is Belarus's best-preserved historic city — a rare skyline of baroque spires and Gothic towers that survived the twentieth century relatively intact. The old town clusters around two ancient castles on a bluff above the Neman River, while the Kalozha Church of the twelfth century is among the oldest stone buildings in the country.

Vitebsk

Marc Chagall was born here in 1887, and Vitebsk still honours him with a museum inside his childhood home and a park of his fantastical sculptures. Every July the city explodes with the Slavianski Bazaar, an enormous Slavic folk and pop music festival that draws performers and crowds from across Eastern Europe and beyond.

Polotsk

Belarus's oldest city sits where the Polota meets the Dvina and carries a millennium of history in its limestone churches and red-brick convents. The eleventh-century Saint Sophia Cathedral — older than most of Western Europe's great cathedrals — dominates the skyline and houses a small organ that fills the nave during evening concerts.

Nesvizh

The small town of Nesvizh is dominated by the Renaissance-to-Baroque palace of the Radziwiłł family — a UNESCO World Heritage Site that once rivalled the grandest residences in Poland-Lithuania. Its ramparts, English-style park, and mirrored lake make for one of the most romantic afternoons in all of Belarus.

Mir

Mir Castle is the postcard image of medieval Belarus: a flinty five-towered Gothic fortress rising from flat farmland, perfectly reflected in its moat. Listed alongside Nesvizh as a UNESCO site, it is small enough to explore in a few hours and large enough to impress — the interior was restored in the 2010s and now holds a hotel within its fortified walls.

Gomel

Belarus's second city has an unexpected cultural gem at its centre — the Rumyantsev-Paskevich Palace, a neoclassical mansion set in an English landscape park above the Sozh River. The city's proximity to Chernobyl-affected territory gives it a particular gravity, and the nearby Vetka Museum holds one of the finest collections of Old Believer icons in the world.

Mogilev

Mogilev's old town survived the Great Patriotic War better than most Belarusian cities, leaving a compact historic centre of townhouses and the seventeenth-century Town Hall tower that became a symbol of civic pride. The Ethnocosmology Museum — yes, really — is a genuinely fascinating mix of folk astronomy and Belarusian rural traditions.

Pinsk

Deep in the Polesia wetlands, Pinsk is a quiet river town with a Jesuit college, a Francis of Assisi monastery, and a waterfront that looks out over the braided channels of the Pina and Pripyat. Boat trips into the surrounding marshes reveal a landscape barely changed in centuries — flat, reed-fringed, and filled with white-tailed eagles.

Braslav

The Braslau Lakes district in the north of the country is Belarus's most scenic corner — a chain of glacial lakes connected by narrow straits, fringed with pine forest and sandy beaches. The small resort town of Braslav is the base for kayaking, cycling, and simply drifting between islands in a country not known for natural tourism.

Kamyanyuki

The village of Kamyanyuki is the gateway to the Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park, the Belarusian side of the ancient Białowieża Forest that straddles the Polish border. Here European bison — zubr — roam through primeval lowland forest that has never been felled, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site of astonishing ecological depth.

Lida

Lida Castle, built by the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas in the fourteenth century, is one of the most impressive fortress ruins in the country — two massive Gothic towers flanking a grassy interior that hosts medieval festival re-enactments each summer. The surrounding town is a convenient base for exploring the castles and Jewish heritage sites of western Belarus.

Kobrin

Suvorov Museum in Kobrin commemorates Alexander Suvorov, the eighteenth-century Russian general who lived here — the wooden estate is one of the best-preserved of its era in Belarus. The town sits on the Dnieper-Bug Canal, and slow boat journeys along its tree-lined banks offer a serene alternative to the open road.

Baranovichi

A railway junction city with a surprisingly engaging Railway Museum, Baranovichi holds a collection of Soviet-era locomotives and carriages that brings the golden age of rail travel vividly back to life. The city is a practical hub for reaching both Mir and Nesvizh castles within a single day trip.

Rising from the flat Belarusian plain, Mir Castle is a striking synthesis of Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque styles built in the early sixteenth century by the Ilinich family and later expanded by the powerful Radziwiłł dynasty. Its five corner towers and moat-fringed walls have been meticulously restored, and the castle today contains a luxury hotel in the east wing — a rare chance to sleep inside a UNESCO site.

The Nesvizh Palace complex was the seat of the Radziwiłł family — one of the most powerful dynasties of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Its twelve distinct landscape parks, formal gardens, and a network of fortifications represent an almost unbroken record of architectural fashion from the Renaissance through the Romantic era.

Straddling the border between Belarus and Poland, Białowieża is the last and largest remnant of the immense primeval forest that once stretched across the European Plain. The Belarusian section — Belovezhskaya Pushcha — shelters the world's largest wild population of European bison (zubr) alongside lynx, wolves, and over 250 bird species in forest that has never been clear-cut.

A chain of survey triangulations stretching from Hammerfest in Norway to the Black Sea, the Struve Arc was used between 1816 and 1855 to establish the precise size and shape of the Earth. Belarus contains five of the arc's original 265 station points, shared across ten countries — a monument to nineteenth-century scientific collaboration on a continental scale.