Minsk History

Minsk History:  
The Origins and Early History

There are many legends relating to the foundation of Minsk and the origin of its name. Situated on the watershed of the river-routes linking the Baltic to the Black sea, its trading history going back to prehistoric times some have thought that the city owes its name to the word miena or "barter". Others look at a hill-fort known as Haradysczy by Stroczyce, a "Skansen"-village, a few kilometers away on the west from the city on the banks of the river Menka, which flows to the river Pticz and on to join the Pripiat' and Dniapro. A heroic folk legend that a giant called Menesk or Mincz kept a mill on the banks of a river, and ground rock and stones to make flower for bread in order to feed the war-band he had assembled to protect his settlement, and safeguard its prosperity. This depended, no doubt, on the portage of goods between the headwaters of Pripiat, Dniapro, and Nioman. So Menesk -- later Mensk -- came into being. The reference to "stone-flour" can allude to kneading and baking of potters clay used in brick-making and ceramics industry, which from the earliest times flourished in the area. There was no lack of wood to fire the kilns.

Ancient Minsk

In prehistoric times the "domain of the bear" predominated over "the domain of the goose"(as Napoleon soldiers aptly dubbed the forest- and meadow-lands of the area) with vast and impenetrable primeval forests covering most of the country and serving as a Delphic "wooden wall" to its successive inhabitants against attacks from the East. Scattered Lithuanians and Jatvyhs hunted and gathered, until merged with the more advanced Slavonic tribes moving northwards from the Carpathians during the so-called Dark Ages. These settled the area forming the watershed of the rivers flowing to the Baltic and the Black Sea, where the early Belarusians founded prosperous townships of Polacak, Viciebsk, Smalensk, Minsk, and Harodnia. Of these Polacak, first mentioned in the chronicles for 862, was to become the most important.

During the era of Viking expansion along the East European waterways, many towns and principalities were ruled over by Scandinavian warlords; in the 9th century the lands of Polacak were raided by two Viking princes Askold and Dir, and by the 10th century a Prince Ravhalod(Norse: Ragnvald) reigned over the Belarusian principality of which early Minsk formed part. The Belarusian nobility to this day distinguishes between families of old Lithuanian and those of Scandinavian descent(Hedymoviczy and Rurikoviczy).

Minsk History:  
Minsk and the Principality of Polacak

Rahvalod's daughter Rahnieda(Norse: Ragnheid) was baptized; she became the wife of Prince Volodimir(Norse: Valdemar) of Kiev and bore him a son Iziaslau. Volodimir was baptized a Christian by missionaries from Constantinople in 988; the population of Polacak accepted Christianity in 989, and by 992 the city had its Bishop. On the death of Volodimir, Iziaslau' became Prince of Polacak, and his half-brother Jaraslav -- Volodimir's son by a previous marriage -- became Prince of Novgorod and later of Kiev. Other sons acquired his domains among the Finno-Ugric tribes of what was to become Muscovy. "Since that time, as the chronicler recorded, "the grandchildren of Rahvalod raised the sword agains the grandchildren of Jaroslav". From the outset there was little unity between the warring princes of "Rus'". Iziaslau'(d. 1001) was succeeded by his son Braczaslau, who it turn was followed by his son Usiaslau the Enchanter (1044 - 1101).

Usiaslau the Enchanter

The dynastic rivalry between the houses of Kiev and Polacak explains the turbulent history of Minsk in its early years, situated as it was on the southern borders of the latter principality. The center of the town had shifted to a new cite giving access to the headwaters of the Vilija and Biarazima and the confluence of the Niamiha and Svisloch rivers. Here also the steep banks of the Niamiha, the high mound south of the stream and Trinity Golden hill offered a good defensive position. Public buildings, dwelling houses, and fortifications were raised of timber. The first recorded mention of Minsk in 1066 relates however to dynastic wars with Kiev. After Usiaslau of Polacak had raided Novgorod and brought to his capital the bells of the Cathedral of St. Sophia, to hang them in his own Cathedral of that name, the three sons of Jaraslav in retribution attacked the city of Minsk: "The people of Menesk(Minsk) barricaded themselves in the town, but the three brothers took Menesk and killed the men, carried off the women and children into captivity, and went towards the Niamiha".

Treacherously seized whilst attending a parley in Smalensk with Isiaslau and the princes of Kiev in 1067, Usiaslau and his two sons were kept captive in Kiev, until an uprising of the inhabitants set them free. Prince Usiaslau fled to Poland, and the Prince of Polacak was offered the throne of Kiev in his stead. The story goes that Usiaslau' longed to return home, and declined the honor for the love of his native land. He was, as the chronicler records, called back to Polacak "by the pealing bells of St. Sophia". The first uncensored Belarusian historical opera performed in Minsk: Usiaslau the Enchanter, Prince of Polacak (1944) by the composer Kulikovicz dealt with this romantic theme. The bells of St. Sophia were to become for Belarusian exiles the symbol of the call of the homeland.

Usiaslau principality of Polacak was, on his death, divided between his sons: the fiefdom of Minsk fell to Hleb, who thus became the first sovereign prince of the city. Internecine quarrels weakened the northern principalities and encouraged the Kievans to reopen hostilities. In 1104 they ravaged the principality of Minsk and shortly thereafter the warlike Lithuanians moved in from the west. Vladimir Monomach again besieged and took Minsk in 1116. Three years later in a further campaign against Polacak, after a battle on the banks of Biarazina, the Kievans "attacked the town, and left neither man nor beast in it".Prince Hleb Usiaslavavicz, together with his two sons, Rascilau and Valadar, was taken into captivity, where he died in exile later that year. He was succeeded by his son Rascislau, but yet again the Kievans attacked in 1129, and placed their nominee Isiaslau Mscislavicz on the throne dispatching Gleb children to serve the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople.

The Grand Duke Hedymin

However, the principality reverted to the princes of Polacak in 1146, with the return of the two sons of Hleb, Rascilau and after him Valadar(1151 - 1158), though Syrakomla gives different dates and the chronicles for this period are incomplete. On the death of the latter prince, Minsk is though to have been governed by Valadar's son Prince Vasylka, at least until 1195. During the reign of the Grand Duke Mindauh(c. 1200 - 1263) of Lithuania, Polacak entered into an alliance with him to expel the Baltic Germans, who had invaded the principality. Thereafter, it appears to have become a Lithuanian appanage, for by 1220 the overlord of Minsk was Prince Edzivil, a nephew of Mindauh. Minsk continued as a semi-independent principality allied with Lithuania, for as late as 1326 the records mention a Prince Todar Svjataslavavicz of Minsk as a witness to a treaty between the Grand Duke Hedymin(d. 1341) and the city-state of Novgorod.

The fall of Kiev to the Mongols in 1240 during the great invasion of Batu Khan, the submission of Jaroslav, the Grand Duke of Moscow, to the Tatars in 1243 and the Lithuanian victory over the Asian invaders first at Kojdanava(1241) under Prince Skirmunt and then at Kruta Hora (1249) a few miles from Minsk, served to consolidate the union between the Belarusian principalities and the Grand Duchy. In 1252 Mindauh and his his leading nobles were baptized, and the Grand Duke was crowned with the approval of Pope Innocent IV in 1253. He fixed his capital in the Belarusian city of Navahrudak, some 100 km west from Minsk.

Minsk History:  
The Early Years of the Grand Duchy

Little is known of the history of the city under the early Grand Duke Vajszelak(d. 1269), Trojdzen(1271 - 1282), and Lutaver (1282 - 1295). In 1323, during the reign of Hedymin (1316 - 1341), the capital of the Grand Duchy was moved from the Navahrudak to Vilnia.

The Kinf of Poland and Grand Duke Jahajla

The fact that Prince Jaunut Hedyminavicz received from the Grand Duke Kejstut the principality of Zaslaue, and reigned in Minsk in 1345, where he was succeeded his son Michal, suggests that the city was by then a royal suzerainty. Prince Michal was present at the coronation in 1386 of Grand Duke Jahajla as King of Poland in Krakow, and gave his oath of allegiance "for himself and his own". In 1390 Jahajla endowed a Catholic Church in Minsk dedicated to the Holy Trinity and Ascension of Our Lady, perhaps in part performance of his written bond on his marriage in 1389 to Queen Jadviha of Poland, to establish Latic-rite Catholicism in his domains; its site in the city is not known, and the wooded building is reputed to have been destroyed by fire in 1409. Many of the suzerains of the Russian principalities to the east of Smalensk, anxious for protection against Moscow -- now reduced to a state of Tatar satrapy, -- sought alliance or union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, so that soon the Grand Duke Alhierd(1345 - 1377) acquired the title of Rex Litvinorum Ruthenorumque, with domains stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The Grand Duke Vitaut

Union did not imply subservience however; and it is noted by Syrakomla that the banner of Minsk was not among the united army of Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles, who under Grand Duke Vitaut(1392 - 1430) defeated the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Gruenwald in 1410. The city had sided with Grand Duke Svidrihajla in a dynastic dispute against Grand Duke Hedymin, and Prince Urustaj of Minsk appeared in 1408, as a witness to a Treaty of mutual aid signed by Svidrihajla and the Grand Duke Basil of Moscow. The establishment of Minsk as a Namiesnictva(Royal Shire) coincided with the absence, noted by Syrakomla, of the city's seal from the Charter of Horadla in that year, -- though few other noblemen of the Greek rite were present at the conference. Thereafter the city appears to have been governed by a namiesnik of Sheriff representing the Grand Ducal authority as hereditary Prince of Zaslaue. This might indicate that Minsk had declined in importance since the Mongol invasions, the sack of Kiev, and the growing threat to the Black Sea trade from the advancing Turks. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the subjection of Crimean Tatars to Ottoman rule in 1475, were to have far reaching effects on the economic, political, and religious life in Minsk, and indeed of the whole Grand Duchy.

Minsk History:  
Renaissance Minsk

In 1499 Grand Duke Alexander Jahajlavicz granted to the city of Minsk a specially favoured autonomous status known as the Magdeburg privelege, manifestly to stimulate trade. This weak and vaccilating monarch in an attempt to pacify his increasingly aggressive Eastern neighbor, the self-proclaimed Tzar Ivan III of Moscow, sought the hand of his daughter, the Grand Dutchess Helen, whose mother was Sophia Paleogos, a relative of the last Byzantine Emperor. Alexander unwisely signed a marriage contract fraught with opportunities for Muscovite interference in Lithuanian religious affairs and the matters of state. Urged on by her Muscovite chaplains, Helen pressed the candidature of her confessor Jonas, Archimandrite of the Ascension monastery in Minsk, to be appointed Metropolitan of Kiev in 1502. This simple but inflexible man was to be the first Lithuanian Metropolitan since 1439 unwilling to support the Florentine Union, entered in between the Latin and Greek churches in the face of Muslim Turkish threat. The highly critical historian Vakar observed that, until the appointment of Jonas, the Catholics and Orthodox, maintained quite friendly relations in Belarus: "The Orthodox clergy in the Grand Duchy took a sympathetic attitude towards the Union of Florence (1439), and would not have rejected it, save for the direct pressure from Moscow". Therein lay the root of the religious discord in the country over the next five centuries.

Grand Duke Zhyhimunt II

The visit to Minsk in 1502 the Grand Duke Alexander and the Grand Duchess Helen did little to avert a succession of disasters. The Eastern principalities of the Grand Duchy were progressively lost to Moscow. Minsk was besieged by the Muscovites, relieved by Prince Hlinski and again sacked, (with the exception of the castle) by the Crimean Tatar Khan, Machmet-Girej(1506). The key Eastern fortress of Smalensk was taken by Tsar Basil III(1513), scarcely before the Grand Duchess of Lithuania, his sister, was cold in her coffin. Fortunately, by his victory over the Russians at Orsza in 1514, the Hetman of the Grand Duchy, Prince Constantine Astrozhski, saved the city from further immediate misfortune. Prior to the battle, the Grand Duke Zhyhimunt II(Pol. I) and the whole court came from Vilnia to Minsk to direct the campaign, in which the Namiesnik(Sheriff) of the city, Prince Bahdan Zaslauski, also took part. However, whilst Zhyhimut was away fighting the Teutonic knights in Prussia, the Muscovite in 1519 once again returned to ravage Lahojsk, Minsk, Hajna, Radaszkaviczy, Barysau', and other towns, despite the stout resistance put up by Mikalaj Radzivil, Albrecht Hasztold and the then sheriff of Minsk, Mikalaj Zaslauski. Both Hasztold and Radzivil attended the Vienna congress in 1515 to set up a coalition against the Turks, and banner were depicted by Skaryna in his allegorical engraving of the March of the Twelve Tribes(1519) as examples of "worthy princes and commanders to protect us from the hand of the heathen". Evidence of the impoverishment of the city is to be found in the military levies for 1529 fixing at 1500 kop hroszau the contribution from Vilnia, 300 from Kouna, Mahiliou: 200, Biarescie: 150, whilst Minsk was only required to underwrite 50 kop.

A Reformist church in Zaslaue

The sorry decline of the traditional Greek- and Latin-rite churches in Belarus, both of which had become corrupt and refused to adopt the Belarusian vernacular, coupled with the failure of attempts to renew the Florentine Union, to consolidate the national church in the face of Muscovite intrigues and the continuing Turkish threat, led many of the most eminent noblemen and soldiers of the age -- Radzivil, Sapieha, Kiszka, Chadkevicz, Pacz, and others as well as some of the ablest writers and thinkers of the day, such as Vasil Ciapinski(1530 - 1603), Symon Budny(1530 - 1593) and the engaging diarist Todar Eulaszeuski(1546 - 1616) -- to embrace the Calvinistic reformed faith. For the less reputable, it was a convenient means of revoking church endowments secured by their forbears on family estates, the churches now being divided. Some of the finest Belarusian church architecture of the period in the Byzantino-Gothic style is to be found at the evangelical churches at Zaslaue(1590), Dzieraunaja(1590), Novy Sverzhan'(c. 1550), all near Minsk, and Smarhoni(1554) amongst many others. The development of a peculiarly art-form in music -- the kantyczka or hymn, was also largely a product of the Reformation. It was the exodus of the nobles and burghers to Calvinizm, rather than any schemings of the Jesuits (who in any case were not then established in Minsk), which resulted in the dereliction of the 13 Greek-rite churches, which according to the local historian Spileuski(1853) had flourished in Minsk at the close of the Middle Ages, including the ancient monastery of the Ascension. Moreover, in 1547 the city was once again devastated by fire, which destroyed the castle and the number of churches in the Lower Town. As a result, in the latter part of the 16th century the Upper town was laid out with broader streets and greater recourse to brickwork in the reconstruction of the city. There were no stone or brick ramparts, the rivers Svislocz and Niamiha served as moats to the east and north, whilst to the south and west the main defence was made up of semi-circular earth-works. In the light of the growing threat from the East, the stockade and redoubt in Trinity suburb were strengthened. The defence of the inhabitants of Minsk, however, depended on the superior fire-power of their artillery, the dense forests to the East, and the embargo by the Catholic European powers on the sale of fire-arms to the troublesome Muscovites.

Minsk History:  
Minsk under the Commonwealth

There can be little doubt that the Council of the Stoglav in Moscow(1551), proclaiming supremacy of the Russian Orthodoxy over all other forms of the Greek-rite faith, the invasion of Belarus of Ivan IV("The Terrible"), the subsequent capture and destruction of Polacak(1563-1579) by the Russians, the estabkishment in 1589 the Patriarchate of Moscow as the "Third Rome", and the breaking after 1558 of the embargo of arms for Muscovy by Protestant England and Holland, were four events so fraught with danger for the Grand Duchy, that it had virtually no choice other than seek a political union with the Kingdom of Poland at Lublin in 1569, and renewed ecclesiastical union with Rome at Biarescie in 1596.

One of many Greek-rite clerics concious of the danger was Michael Rahoza. In 1576 he was appointed Archimandrite of the Ascension monastery in Minsk, which had remained vacant for several decades. He was consecrated the Metropolitan of Kiev in 1588 by the visiting Patriarch Jeremija of Constantinople who, "being unable to meet the financial demands of the Turks, had come to the North to look for money"(Guepin). Two years previously, the Patriarch of Antioch, Joachim had returned to his Turkish overlords, "carrying off large sums of money" collected from pious Orthodox believers in Belarus and Ukraine, which in turn helped the Turks to finance their campaigns against the Grand Duchy. The Greek Catholic(Uniate) Archbishop of Polacak, Josaphat Kuncevicz, stressed the peril in his reply to Chancellor Leu Sapeha's famous letter reproaching him with his hostility to the Constantinopolitan faction, the non-Uniate Cossacks of Ukraine and their then covert supporters, the Turks: "Are we to allow the Patriarch, a Metropolitan, a bishop, nay, even a pasha who has taken the precaution of donning a monks habit and assuming the title of Exarch, to come to this land with janissaries, on the pretext of a pastoral visitation, in order to spy and hatch treasonable plots? Are not we to prevent because this would indispose the Cossacks?". Minsk was to play an important part in the struggle for the restoration of the Florentine Union, as the only means of ending both the pretensions of the Tsar and Patriarch of Moscow, and of Constantinople, to political and ecclesiastical supremacy over "all the Russias and all the countries of the North". A council of the clergy of the Greek church was held in Minsk in 1620 presided over by Metropolitan Rutski with a view to obtaining adherence of the passive majority to the Union. The session, according to Syrakomla, appears to have been stormy, as a result of the bold intervention of the conservative anti-Union monk, Todar Jarmolicz. However, as the French church historian Guepin observed, "The extinction of the Ruthenian schism had become a matter of State".

The political union with Poland in 1569, and the problems involved in selection a joint ruler for the Kingdom and the Grand Duchy, resulted in some curious situations, as where a reluctant French Prince, Henri de Valois, brought back from Paris as ephemeral sovereign in 1574, by a delegation including Chancellor Radzivil, began appending his signature and seal as Grand Duke to the decrees written in the old Belarusian language. The union also altered the status of Minsk, which became instead of a Grand Ducal Namiestnictva(Shire), a standard Vajavodstva (County) of the Reczypaspalitaja(Commonwealth) with Hauryla Harnastaj as its first Vajavod(High Constable), Mikola Talvasz as Castellan and Bazyl Tyszkevicz as Starasta(Lord Lieutenant). Minsk became not only the seat of its own County Court and Land Tribunal, but also after 1581 a session town, in which the High Court of the Grand Duchy would sit when on circuit, the privelege it shared with Vilnia and the former capital Navahrudak. An occational pleader in the Minsk Courts was Todar Jeulaszeuski, who in his diary mentions his appearances at the sessions there in 1583. During the wars against Ivan the Terrible(1563-1579) Minsk once again served as operational headquaters for the Grand Ducal armies, and the King and Grand Duke Zhyhimunt III(Pol. II) sojourned there during the campaigns of 1563 and 1568. His successor Zhyhimunt IV(Pol. III) confirmed the city in its priveleges, granted the merchants the right to hold two Fairs each year and endowed municipality with additional lands in 1592.

Mialecii Smatrycki

This was not always appreciated by the local population, stirred up by false rumors of impeding liturgical and festival changes, and fearful of the interference of an increasingly Polish-oriented sovereign into the affairs of the Grand Duchy. Mialecii Smatrycki (1577 - 1633), for a time hostile to, but later a supporter of the Uniate cause, has been received at the Salamarecki estate at Siomkava, near Minsk, on his return from Leipzig, and was said by Syrakomla to have written a part of his anti-Uniate polemical work Threnos of the Complaint of the Eastern Church during his stay there. When the Union of Biaresce was signed in 1596, many of the inhabitants of Minsk accepted it without protest. Those who did not follow the advice of the Vilnia Holy Ghost Confraternity, obtained from the Minsk magistrates in 1613 the grant of land for a church by the Niamiha, and called for non-Uniate priests from Vilnia to service it. The Grand Duke, who resented the establishment of these non-Uniate confraternities, which, with their schools and fund-raising activities for Muslim-occupied Constantinople, began to look very much like a hostile state within a state, sent two Uniate Greek-rite priests with royal letter-patents to seize the church building. The fair minded city fathers, however, appear to have been sympathetic to the Minsk cofraternity, and received the royal envoys, Luckebicz and Hainski, with some coldness, declaring that the city council had many other worries apart from the church affairs, and in the event nothing was done. Indeed, the first decade of the 17th century had been a time of sharp famine and plague, as well as of outbreaks of fire in the city(1602), so their calm had some justification. The three attempts in August 1616 on the newly established non-Uniate Cathedral confraternity, led by a shoemaker Danila Palavinka, to seize the Holy Ghost Cathedral, followed by the unlawful detention by the mob of the Catholic and Uniate burgomasters Aliaksej Philipovicz and Siamion Chatkevicz merely served to strengthen the fears of the peaceful majority of the townspeople over the political undertones of the Confraternity's campaign, and to advance the cause of the Greek Catholics. The publication in 1617 by Liavon Kreuza's Oborona Jednosti Cerkovnoj ("Defense of the Union") in reply to Smatrycki's Threnos was a skillful and convincing polemical work, which won over many waverers of the Union.

The Cathedral of the Holy Ghost

Since 1596 the bitterest dispute had arisen between the two factions over the ownership of Church property. These resulted in two outbreaks of unrest in Minsk(1597, 1616), and the martyrdom of the Uniate Archbishop of Polacak Josaphat Kuncevicz(1580 - 1623); they were finally settled at the conciliation meeting between the contending parties, held in Minsk in 1625. Both the Uniate Metropolitan Jasep Veniamin Rucki and the non-Uniate Metropolitan Peter Mohila attended the conference, which took place at a time when Muscovite rulers, weaked by internal strife, driven back from Novgorod and Smalensk, and at odds with Cossacks, were not in a position to interfere with the affairs of the Grand Duchy. Another Uniate School of SS. Cosmo and Damian opened in 1619. At this time also were built the Dominican monastery(1622), the Bernadine convents(1628, 1642), and the Basilian Church of the Holy Ghost(1645), all in the Upper Town, as well as the Basilian convent of the Holy Trinity in the Trinity suburb(1630). A privelege was also granted by the Grand Duke Uladzislau I (Pol. IV) in 1633 to the Basilian convent of the Holy Ghost and the Orthodox Confraterity of SS. Peter and Paul to establish printing presses; in the same year the increasingle wealthy Confraternity established a hospital and a school "for the instruction of Christians and their children". By the mid-17th century the Uniate churches in Minsk had seven confraternities owning houses, shop and land; the majority of the city churches and their endowments however remained in the hands of Greek Catholics, secure from the Turkish Sultan and the Russian Tsar.

Thereafter Minsk enjoyed several decades of prosperity during which trade flourished. A number of merchant corporations were established after 1552 -- the Guild of Metalworkers(1591), the Jewellers(1592), the Merchant Tailors(1592), the Shoemakers(1609), the Saddlers(1622), the Barbers(1635), and the Skinners(1647). Other guilds included Hatters, Tile-makers, Cooks, Carpenters, and Furriers. Churches, town houses, and public places were embellished, and culture generally (iconography, music, sculpture, and the applied arts) reached high levels of achievement.

Minsk History:  
The Muscovite Wars and the Polish Ascendancy

In 1633 a Dutch founderer Witte established a cannon-factory at Tula, the first in the domains of Tsar Alexei Mikhailovicz, thus finally breaking the arms embargo with the Empire, the Hansa and the Grand Duchy had sought to impose on their unruly Eastern neighbor. This sounded the death knell of the peaceful interregnum enjoyed by Minsk since 1580. By 1648 the Muscovites rearmed the Cossacks and in 1652 they were ready to resume hostilities against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Belarus. A host of 700,000(as large as Napoleon's Grande Armee), embarked on a campaign equipped and financed -- according the the Syrian eye-witness Paul of Aleppo -- by the merchants of Moscow, grown enormously wealthy since the fall of Kazan and Astrachan(1554, 1556) on "merchandise from Persia and India"), and anxious further to enrich themselves by elimination their Grand Ducal trading competitors between the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Moscow's Patriarch Nikon added his widow's mite of 20,000 armed men, recruited among his monastic servants to join the expedition. Smalensk fell after a short seige in 1654; Nikolas Radzivil and his captains were held prisoners in Kazan. The Belarusian fortress cities of Viciebsk, Mahiliou, Polacak, and Orsza were also taken in swift succesion.

The Grand Duke Jan Cazimir

The account of the fall of Minsk among other cities, and the manner of the legendary "reunion of Belarus with the Russian State" by Tsar Alexei, is best left to the contemporary Orthodox Deacon Paul of Aleppo, then in Moscow(1653 - 1655): "His variuos officers subdued upwards of ninety four towns and castles, by storm and voluntary surrender; killing God knows how many Jews, Armenians, and Poles, and throwing their children packed in barrels into the great river Dniepr withour mercy; for nothing can exceed the hatred that the Muscovites bear to all classes of heretics and infidels. All the men without exception they cut to pieces without sparing one; the women and children they carried off into slavery, after destroying their habitations so as to leave their town entirely desolate. Thus the country if the Poles, which formerly was proverbially rich, and bore comparison with the finest provinces of Greece, now became a vast scene of ruin, where not a village or inhabitant was to be found in fifteen days journey in length and breadth. We were informed that more than one hundred thousand of the enemy were reduced to captivity, so that seven or eight boys and girls were sold for a dinar or less; and many of them we ourselves saw. In the towns which they took by capitulation, they spared all those inhabitans and allowed them to remain, who embraced the faith and were baptized; the rest were all expelled. But the towns which they captured at the point of the sword they totally cleared of their inhabitants, and levelled their houses and the fortifications to the ground." Other sources set the toll of ruined cities and towns in Belarus between 1654 and 1656 at over two hundred.

Minsk on the 30th of June, 1655 "readily surrendered to the Orthodox Tsar", and two Muscovite Princes, Arseniev and Chvorostin, were appointed as governors. The inhabitants were given choice of "accepting Russian Orhtodoxy (pravoslavije) or of being removed from the city by order of the Tsar". The manner of their "removal", whether by chain-gang or by river, as described by Paul of Aleppo, needs no further elaboration. Subsequent exactions and ill-treatment of the population, however, moved the remaining Orthodox citizens to rebellion after two years, which was swiftly dealt with by the Muscovites. By the 1660, however, the tide of war had changed. The Russian forces were overstretched and in 1661 Jan Casimir regained Harodnia and Vilnia after long sieges. The Cossack Ataman Zalatarenko was killed before Stary Bychau and Minsk was retaken. The citizenry of Mahiliou rose up to massacre the Muscovites, dispatching their leaders in chains to Warsaw. Recovery from the holocaust was slow and only got under way in the latter part of the 18th century. "The glorious city of Polacak" which, according to Vakar, "once had 100,000 inhabitans and was larger and wealthier than London", had "only 360 frame houses inhabited by 437 Christians and 478 Jews in 1780". In the latter stages of the war the fortunes of the Commonwealth improved, and Minsk again became an advanced camp for the liberation of Belarus by the Grand Duke Jan Kasimir(1648 - 1668) who, together with the future sovereign Jan Sobieski, visited the ruined and plague-ridden city of Minsk on no fewer than three occasions in 1664.

The Upper Town

Peace was restored by the city of Anrussovo in 1667. Its terms, however, untimately proved to be the death warrant of Belarus as an independent state, for it contained a clause giving Moscow a right to intervene on behalf of the small Orthodox community to the Grand Duchy and Poland, a right confirmed in 1686, and repeatedly and oppresively invoked by succeding Russian ambassadors almost yearly thereafter. However, another three decades ensured for Minsk a period of reconstruction and growing prosperity with an increase in brick- and stone-built houses, and in the embellishment of new churches. The convent of the Franciscans was restored in 1673 by the city Stolnik(High Steward), Todar Vankovicz. In 1679 the priveleges of the Jews in Minsk were confirmed by the King and Grand Duke Jan Kazimier. The Calvinist chapel was also rebuilt in 1671, thanks to a gift of timber from Janus Radzivil, and a minister Krysztaf z Jarnau'ca was relieved from holding his services in the open air. By 1680 however, his office had to be conducted with some circumspection, on occassion in a private house to avoid molestation from rowdy pupils of Jesuit school. Established in Minsk since 1654, the order was richly endowed by benefactors after 1667, in particular by the Vajavod of Troki, Cypryjan Brzhastouski, whose family remained patrons of the Jesuit college for many years. Other benefactors included Stanislau Zabloc'ki, Jan Philipovicz, Juri Furs, who contributes gifts to building a new church from 1701 - 1705. A Benedictine convent was later established in vul. Zbarovaja (Internacyjanalnaja) in 1700 by Anna Steckievicz, widow of the Banceret of Minsk, and a Carmelite house was founded in the Rakouski suburb by Todar Vankicicz in 1703. In addition to the Church of the Holy Ghost on Cathedral Square, the Uniates had at the end of the 18th century two other churches in the Lower market, at the southern end of the Tatar suburb and by the southern fortifications of the city, near the site later occupied by the Russian Orthodox cathedral of the Holy Cross and the Jubilejny dom BNR.

Fearful of further Russian claims to the Grand Duchy, official policy sought to integrate the Belarusian population into the Polish sphere by downgrading their institutions, including the Uniate Church, and smoothing out the differences between the Polish language and its Belarusian "dialects". In 1697 all documents were required to be written not in the Cyrillic, but in the Latin script -- latinka. Even in some Uniate service books, prayers and hymns in Polish were introduced, often disguised in the old Slavonic script, to gain acceptance and promote the "unification" of the Commonwealth. The policy was to some extent understable in the face of continuing Russian encroachments, the more so because even ethnographers of Belarusian descent such as A. Rypinski, were unclear as to the true place of the Belarusian people between the Western and Eastern Slavs. Its effect however was dire to the future of Belarusian language and culture.

Minsk History:  
The Decline and Partitions

During the debilitating Northern Wars(1700 - 1721) between the Commonwealth, Sweden, and Russia, Minsk was twice occupied by the armies of Peter the Great and once by Charles XII. During his first visitation in 1704, Peter dined twice very civilly with the Jesuits and inspected his troops in the Upper Market; characteritically, however, during his second stay in 1708, his Cossacks and Kalmuks pludered the city, sparing neither Catholic nor Orthodox churches, and set it on fire.

Stanislau Paniatouski, the last king of the Commonwealth

With the return of peace there was an improvement of communications. Roads and canals were built; postal services were set up in Belarus in 1717 between Vilnia, Minsk and Mahiliou, and between Minsk and Navagrudak. The Dominicans established a school in 1727, and in 1792 Pan Szyszka founded a church of St. Roch. More guilds were formed by Royal privelege for the protection of local trade -- the Vintners, the Gardeners, the Water-carriers, the Brewers and Meadmakers. Occassionally the conflicts of jurisdiction between the Municipal Courts, the Grand Ducal Court, the Church Courts, and the Seignorial Court lit in matters of breach of trade monopolies and unfair competition. Against a background of dynastic squabbles between the increasingly polonized Bykouskis, Zaviszas, and Valadakoviczy, rivalries between the various religious orders(including a famous street-fight in 1728 between the Dominicans and the Jesuits over some runaway schoolboys), processions, parades, street fairs with dancing bears and firework displays, the Grand Ducal era of Minsk teetered to its close. The city's great Vajavod and benefactor Ihnat Zavisza(whose portrait with the sitter wearing aristocratic sash or pojas, is to be seen in the National Museum of Art), died in 1739, and was laid to rest after a solemn Requiem at the Maryjnski Cathedral in a blaze of over 4000 candles and 12,000 votive lights.

Trajetski Pradmiescie

Periodic conflagrations(1737, 1764, 1778), famines, and outbreaks of the plague led to some reconstruction of Churches and houses in brick rather than wood and also to the foundation of more hospitals. The great fire in 1737 resulted in the rebuiding of two Bernardine convents in the Upper Town(including the present Holy Ghost Cathedral); yet another outbreak in 1764 occassioned rebuilding the Uniate Holy Trinity convent in Trajecki Pradmiescie. A conflagration finally destroyed the old timber-frame castle within the earthworks by the Niamiha. An even inreasing number of houses in city were being out of brick, many of which have survived and in this respect Minsk was well in advance of Russian cities such as Moscow. By the mid-18th century MInsk had two benevolent hospitals. As for schools, in addition to fee paying pupils, the Jesuit college atmitted as students the children of poor families free of charge, until the suppression of the Order in 1773. Both the Russian and the Dominican monasteries offered similar free educational facilities, and by 1771 there was also a Mariavitan school for girls in Trinity suburb.

Meanwile the election of each new sovereign -- Augustus II (1697 - 1733), Augustus III (1733 - 1763) and Stanislaw Poniatovski(1764 - 1795) -- and the escalating complaints of the non-Uniate Greek-rite minority gave a pretext for foreign intervention. In 1733 Minsk was occupied by more than 20,000 Russian soldiers, cavalry and infantry under General Volkonsky, accompanied by inevitable swarms of Cossacks and Kalmuks, though it is said that in the event they were on their best behavior. Inevitably perhaps in these unsettled times the Grand Duchy was plauged by bandits such Adam Kroher, whose raids sowed panic throughout Belarus, until his capture and execution in 1737.

Ultimately the Commonwealth was dismembered by Russia, Prussia, and Austria in three partitions. Polacak, Viviebsk and Mahiliou were annexed by Russia in 1773. A judicial reorganization of the Grand Ducal Courts followed, resulting in the removal of the Session of the High Court from Minsk to Harodnia in 1775, but in 1791 the city became the seat of the Court of Appeal for Vajavodstvy(Counties) of Polacak, Viciebsk and Minsk. Two years later in 1793 the city and the remaining bulk of the Grand Duchy were occupied by the Russians. A successful attempt was made by the govenment of the Commonwealth to persuade the non-Uniate faction in Belarus to leave the Russian jurisdiction for that of Constantinople. Although the Belarusian Orthodox had agreed to the reform, the Russian Empress Catherine would not hear of it, and seized on the move as a pretext to intervene definitively and extend her domains further to the west. By 1796 the whole ethnic territory of Belarus had been absorbed in the Russian empire, of which it was to remain a part for almost 120 years.

Minsk History:  
Minsk under Russian Rule

The Russian Governors' first steps were to restrict the Belarusian Greek-Catholic Church; the Basilian Convents in the Upper Town and in Trinity suburb were closed in 1795, and the Holy Ghost Church handed over to the Russian Orthodox hierarchy, who in 1796 renamed it after the apostles SS. Peter and Paul. The former Belarusian Orthodox Church with this name was reconsecrated to St. Catherine, thus commemorating the parthners of the two sovereigns who had established Russian rule over the city. Plans were drawn up for impoving the city amenities; public gardens were laid out by the river Svislacz, which were named the Governor's Gardens, and the architect Todar Kramer was commissioned to remodel the City Guildhall, the Vice-governor's residence(1800), the Basilian monastery, now a school for children of the gentry(1799), the Merchants' Exchange(1800), the Jesuit college and the Holy Trinity convent in the Trinity suburb(1799) and other buildings. These reconstructions were done to neutral neo-classical designs of West European municipial arcitecture, which left little room for national particularism.

Minsk in the 19th century 

In 1812 the French Emperor Napoleon crossed the Nioman river, making the purpose of his campaign against the Tsar plain to his generals. Irritated, after a meeting with Alexander's envoy, General Balachov, by the pretensions of successive Russian Tsars to make themselves the arbiters of the European politics, he explained to his General Berthier, Caulaincourt and Duroc: "Alexander takes me for a fool, Does he think that I have come to Vilnia to negotiate trade agreements? I have to finish off, once and for all, this colossus of the barbarians of the North. The sword is drawn. They must be driven back to their ice-fields so that for twenty-five years they do not come meddling in the affairs of civilized Europe... He[Alexander] is afraid and wants a settlement, but I only sign a peace treaty in Moscow... If he wants victories, let him beat the Persians, but let him note meddle with Europe. Civilization repudiates these Norsemen. Europe should put its house in order without them." The composition of his confederate army -- French, Poles, Italians, Germans, Dutchmen, Portuguese and Austrians -- gave some weight to his claim to be acting for Europe. Napoleon leaving Marshal Oudinot to hold Polacak, and Marshal Davout to occupy Minsk drove on to Viciebsk. Only 180,000 men set off from Smalensk for Moscow: the rest were protecting the Grande Armee's flanks or were on garrison duty. Most of whatever material destruction took place during the campaign was caused by the brutal but very effective Russian tactics of "scorched earth" -- burning cities(among them Mahiliou and Smalensk), villages and crops to prevent them from being taken by the enemies of the Orthodox Tsar.

In Minsk Devout received strong local support and attended a Te Deum celebrated by the Bishop Dederko to mark the liberation of the city from Russian rule. A popular move was a decree confiscating the harvests of the fleeing Russian nobility, and dividing them equally between the Army, the Civil administration, and the peasants. Implementing Napoleon's plan to restore the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Belarus as two separate states, with their capitals in Vilnia and Mahiliou, Minsk was made the Prefecture of a revolutionary department, and numerous Belarusian volunteers formed units in the Grande Armee. During Napoleon's retreat from Moscow these volunteers fought with great valour, defending the bridges and covering the French crossings of the Biarazina. Allowing for heavy losses sustained at Borodino and other engagements at Krasnaje, together with subsequent desertions of disaffected Germans and other allies, the arrival at the bridges of 70,000 men in combat order was hardly that of a defeated army. In the words of an old French soldier of the Imperial Guards who made it back to Vilnia: "We gave them a good trunching at every turn, just the same. Those "Russkis" are only a bunch of schoolboys." On the return of Kutuzov to Minsk in late November there were few reprisals, with the exception of the Bishop Dederka who was suspended, and a general amnesty was subsequently proclaimed.

Russian rule thereafter remained relatively mild, save for the suppression of Greek-Catholic church, until uprisings of 1831 and 1863. Then russification began in earnest with Russian style churches being built in prominent positions, or existing churches being revamped into sometimes grotesque pseudo-Russian style(SS. Peter and Paul prior to 1979). The National Uniate church was suppressed in 1839, occassionally at sword point, with many recalcicrant priests being imprisoned or deported for up to thirty years. Many of the Latin clergy were expelled; the Bernhadine convent and Church were given over to Russian Orthodox monks. The Dominican Church became an army warehouse and the Bernhadine Church of St. Joseph a city archive. Streets were given different names in Russian to efface the memory of the old order: Franciskankaja became Gubernatorskaja, Dominikanskaja was renamed Petrapaulauskaja, Bernadzinski zavulak -- Monastyrski, Felicijanskaja -- Bogodelnaja, Mastovskaja -- Paliciejskaja and so on. An ukaz of the Tsar Nikolas I abolished the very use of names Belarus and Belarusian. The consequences of Kastus Kalinouski' uprising were important and far reaching for the city of Minsk and the surrounding areas. Many thousands of their inhabitants were deported to Siberia, or imprisoned -- among them the poet Vincent Dunin-Marcinkievicz, -- in the Pilszczalauski Fortress, erected in 1825, almost in anticipation of future trouble.

The Church of Mary Magdalene

Yet apart from these upheavals, a long period of peace brought with it material prosperity. Industry and the arts flourished though occational fires and epidemics continued to plague the city. There were two particularly virulent outbreaks of typhus in 1848 and 1853. The Tsars showed little interest in Minsk and seldom visited it, except on tours of inspection of the Imperial Army headquarters in Mahiliou. Alexander I came in 1819 to address the nobility, and Alexander II visited the city in 1859. Permission to built Catholic churches was generally limited to cemetery chapels, though exuberant Russian churches and shrines such as the new Cathedral, the Church of the Protection and the Holy Cross, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Alexander Nevski, the Church of the Trasfiguration, Our Lady of Kazan and others mushroomed across the city. The old coat-of-arms granted by Zhyhimunt IV charged with the image of the Teotokos, which in 1796 had been augmented with the Russian double-headed eagle, was untimately replaced in 1878 by a field or, "three wavy bars azure". Perhaps most relevant to the quality of life and the inhabitants was the installation of the municipal water system(1874), a telephone service(1890), two-horse drawn tram-lines(1892) and current electricity(1895).

However, all these to suppress the language, the national symbolica, and to adulterate the visible signs of Belarusian individuality, finally brought a growing number of Belarusians to the realization that they were indeed a different nation. Ethnographical traditions engendered national pride, even as the nationalist poets Maxim Bahdanovicz and Zmitrok Biadulia were born, one of an eminent Minsk enthnogpapher, the other of a traditionally minded Hassidic Jew from the Lahojsk hills. The unique flavor of Belarusian life was captured in works of one of Minsk's greatest residents, who now lies buried here, -- Jakub Kolas. During this period Minsk acquired its National Theater(1890), its first School of Art founded by Ja. Kruher(1906), the beginnings of its "Academy of Sciences" at the Belarusian Chata(1913) and proposals were also made in 1913 for the establishment of the National University in Minsk. Renewed stirrings of national protest came with anti-tsarist riots in 1905. There were strikes and demostrations in Minsk, and the students of the Orthodox seminary set fire to their college; as a result societies and clubs were dissolved, students expelled, and the poets Jakub Kolas, Kastus Kalaniec, and Ales Harun, among many others, were imprisoned for their clandestine activities.

Minsk History:  
Towards Independence

The coats-of-arms of Belarusian counties

Later came the First World War and one of the most dramatic episodes in the city's history -- the power-struggle between the Belarusian National Rada and the Bolsheviks from 1917-1919. On the national side stood such distinguished patriots as Professor E. Karski, General K. Aliexejeuski, Anton Luckievicz, Edvard Vajnilovicz, the poet Ales Harun, Col. Kastus Jezavitau, Janka Kupala, Jazep Varonka, Count Skirmunt, Zmitrok Biadulia, Princess Mahdaliena Radzivil(the Countess Markievicz of Belarus) and others, in particular the railway workers. The Bolshevik side was led by Russian internationalist and professional revolutionaries -- Lander, Knorin, and Miasnikou, -- backed by mutinous but well armed Tsarist soldiers, who ultimately prevailed. Over the next twenty years, however, the bold ideas of the socialist revolution became stained with the blood of hundreds of thousands of victims summarily shot by Bolshevik special units in the "killing-fields" of Golden Hill and Kurapaty. Many more starved to death as a result of collectivization of agricultural land, hastily introduced by the 9th All-Belarusian Soviet Congress held in Minsk(1929).

Minsk after the World War II

The arrival of the Germans in 1941, after the encirclement near Minsk by General von Bock of 300,000 Red Army soldiers with more than 300 tanks, brought more bloodshed with the Nazi mass murders. However, many Jews escaping death at the hands of the Nazis were sheltered and helped by the local populace. There followed more executions and mass-deportations by the Bolsheviks of the so-called "collaborators". Yet some good came from all these ills: Eastern and Western Belarus(formerly under Poland) were reunited in 1939. The Belarusian Republic was admitted as a founding member of the United Nations in 1946. The ruined city of Minsk was rebuilt as the show-place capital of the modern Republic, larger and more populous than Bulgaria, Denmark, Portugal or Hungary.

The awakening to nationhood in 1863 and 1904, the role played by the citizens of Minsk of every class in the creation of an independent Republic in 1918, and the subsequent destiny of the city as the cultural capital of Belarus, rather than of some administrative area in a Marxist dreamworld, -- all these cemented by years of strife, suffering and persecution during the Revolution and the Nazi-Soviet conflict(1941 - 1945), has helped to make Minsk a united city with a character very much of its own. Despite the destruction and thoughtlessness of planners, a great deal of the old Minsk has survived, and is being painstakingly restored. Neither were the visions of the totalitarian idealists entirely fruitless, as the fine avenues, squares, parks and impressive new buildings of the new Minsk demonstrate. These were result of plans drawn as long ago as 1926, which included constructivist art deco of Government House(1934), the National Opera and Ballet(1939) and the Academy of Sciences(c. 1935) by Ja. Langbard, and later in 1944 with the impressive neo-classicism of the Congress Palace (1954), the Polytechnical Intitute(1946), Victory Square(1954) and Skaryna Avenue. Industry, technology and the arts have made great strides, and city now boats two airports and a fine modern underground railway system. It has become an international city on the circuits of world statesmen.

A public demonstration in Minsk in 1989

But perhaps the greatest moments of Minsk have been in the recent past, when mass rallies in Independence Square, at the Kupala monument, in the City Sports Stadium, and at Kurapaty, showed to the world that the "forgotten people" has at last become a nation, with the crowds taking up the historic cry of the old peasants at the All-Belarusian congress in 1917, as the elderly General Alexiejeuski, -- a boy at the time of Kalinouskki' uprising(1863), -- kissed the white-red-white flag: "Long live free Belarus! Long live the national flag!".

Both old and new Minsk have their history and their achievements, which are there for citizen and visitor to enjoy. What has, like Dublin, become known as the Kachany Horad ("The dear old Town") on a Golden Hill, a city of icons resplendent with gold, in which filigree gates of gold are created out of something as commonplace, yet as rich as plaited straw, where all the children seem to have golden hair, is surely a fitting capital for the land which poets have called "Belarus, golden Belarus".