Minsk lost roughly 80% of its buildings and most of its population between 1941 and 1944, then was rebuilt as a Soviet showpiece. These three days trace what survived, what was erased, and what was deliberately raised in its place.
Founded 1633 as a Bernardine convent church, the twin-towered cathedral holds the miraculous Minsk Icon of the Mother of God, said to have floated up the Svislach in 1500. The Upper Town square around it was the merchant heart of the city from the 16th century.
Minsk received Magdeburg rights in 1499; the town hall symbolising that self-government was demolished by Tsar Nicholas I in 1857 and rebuilt from archive drawings in 2003. The basement museum displays the excavated original foundations and the city charter.
Built 1700-1710 for the Jesuits, this Baroque cathedral was stripped of its towers in 1951 and used as a Spartak sports hall; the frescoes were plastered over. Restored 1993-1997, with fragments of the original 18th-century wall painting deliberately left exposed.
The chronicle entry for the Battle of Nemiga in 1067 is the first written mention of Minsk. The castle mound stood here until Soviet roadworks; the excavated 11th-century layers and a fragment of the earliest stone church are marked at the Nemiga metro underpass.
Between 1937 and 1941 the NKVD executed an estimated 30,000 to 250,000 people in these pine woods on the northern edge of Minsk. Mass graves were exposed by archaeologist Zianon Pazniak in 1988. Hundreds of wooden crosses now stand among the pits.
On 2 March 1942 around 5,000 Jews of the Minsk ghetto were murdered in this sandpit. The 2000 bronze sculpture 'The Last Way' shows victims descending the stairs. The 1947 obelisk carries one of the only Yiddish-language Soviet war inscriptions ever permitted.
The largest Nazi extermination site on Soviet soil after Auschwitz, Majdanek and Treblinka: some 206,500 people were killed here between 1941 and 1944. The Gate of Memory opened in 2015; the Blagovshchina forest path marks 34 burial pits.
The 1947 KGB building, still the only such agency in Europe using the original name, was designed by Mikhail Parusnikov with a tower reportedly added for General Tsanava's personal observation. The interior remains closed; the facade defines the boulevard's tone.
Housed in an 1830s building, the collection runs from Neolithic finds through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to the Belarusian People's Republic of 1918. The Slutsk sashes gallery and the 12th-century Cross of Euphrosyne replica are the standouts.
The Nazi ghetto established in July 1941 held over 100,000 people across this quarter. Surviving low brick houses on Rakauskaya and Vitsebskaya, the 1874 Cold Synagogue site and the Jewish cemetery gate mark a district that has almost no signage.
The 18th-century Lubanski estate at Loshitsa was the Gestapo officers' residence during the occupation and the site of the 1905 estate gardens. The restored manor house museum covers the Prushinski family and the wartime years in its east wing.
Opened 1996 for the 771 Belarusians killed in the Soviet-Afghan War, the chapel is modelled on the 11th-century Church of Saints Boris and Gleb in Polatsk. Four altars list the dead by name; the weeping angel outside faces away from the city.