Belarus

This is the land of the medieval principality of Polotsk and then a core territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, whose chancery language was Ruthenian, an ancestor of Belarusian. From 1569 it was part of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the partitions of the late eighteenth century transferred it to the Russian Empire. It was also a centre of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, with many towns that were majority Jewish — a world annihilated in the Holocaust.

Belarus was fought over ferociously in both world wars. As Soviet "Belorussia" it lost about a quarter of its population and half of its economic resources, with hundreds of villages burned and Minsk left in ruins, which is why the capital today is a city of sweeping Stalinist avenues. In 1986 the Chernobyl disaster, just over the border in Ukraine, deposited most of its fallout on south-eastern Belarus.

A brief national revival around independence in 1991 was rolled back after Alexander Lukashenko took power in 1994 and restored Soviet-style symbols and Russian's dominance. The disputed 2020 election triggered the largest protests in the country's history, met with mass arrests; the opposition leadership is now in exile. Belarus is tightly aligned with Russia and served as a staging ground for Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drawing heavy Western sanctions.

Belarus is an East Slavic country, Orthodox-majority with a notable Catholic minority in the west around Hrodna. National identity has had a suppressed history, and the Belarusian language is a real marker of it — its everyday use is now itself a quietly political act, associated with the opposition.

Folk culture is strong: Kupalle, the midsummer festival with fire-jumping and wreath-floating; straw-weaving and the vytsinanka paper-cut craft; and village rites still practised in places. Literature is central to the national canon, from the founding poets Yanka Kupala and Yakub Kolas to the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich, whose oral histories of the Soviet and post-Soviet experience are read worldwide — and who, like many cultural figures, has left the country.

Hospitality is warm and food-heavy. Ice hockey — Lukashenko's game — is heavily sponsored by the state and is the most popular sport after football, and the country has produced strong athletes and tennis players, with Victoria Azarenka and Aryna Sabalenka among its best-known figures.

About a fifth of the population lives in Minsk, a spacious, orderly capital of monumental boulevards, a reconstructed old quarter, cheap public transport, and a visible state presence. The rest of the country is mid-sized regional cities — Brest, Hrodna, Vitebsk, Homel, Mahilyow — and farming villages among the forests and drained marshes.

The economy retains a large state sector and heavy industry from Soviet days — tractors, trucks, potash, refined oil — cushioned for years by cheap Russian energy and now squeezed by sanctions. Media and political life are tightly controlled, and the security service still operates under its old name, the KGB.

Everyday life is calm and inexpensive, with well-kept parks, reliable services, and little of the petty crime common in busier countries. Foraging for mushrooms and berries in the forests is a national habit, and the dacha — a country plot for growing vegetables — is central to many families' year.

Belarusian cooking is hearty and northern, and built above all on the potato; Belarusians have long been nicknamed bulbashi, from bulba, "potato." The emblem is draniki, crisp potato pancakes served with sour cream or with machanka, a thick meat-and-sausage gravy. Kolduny (stuffed potato dumplings) and baked grated-potato puddings are variations on the theme.

Beyond potatoes there are beet and cabbage soups, including kholodnik, a cold, shocking-pink beet summer soup served with sour cream and hard-boiled egg; salo (cured pork fat); homemade sausages; rye bread; and pickled mushrooms and forest berries. Meals are substantial and plainly seasoned.

To drink: kvass in summer, herb-flavoured vodkas such as zubrovka, krambambula (a Belarusian spirit-based mixed drink, made to many recipes), and Belarusian vodkas. Tea and cake follow almost any visit.

Two UNESCO castles west of the capital anchor most trips. Mir Castle, in the Hrodna region, is a picturesque sixteenth-century fortified residence blending Gothic and Renaissance; Nesvizh is grander — the palace complex, park, and mausoleum of the powerful Radziwiłł family. They are an easy day trip from the capital and often visited together.

Minsk itself has the monumental Independence Avenue and its Stalinist ensemble, Victory Square, the reconstructed Upper Town and Trinity Suburb, and the sobering Great Patriotic War museum. Brest, on the Polish border, holds the vast Soviet memorial at the Brest Fortress, honouring the defenders of 1941.

For nature, Belovezhskaya Pushcha National Park — the primeval forest straddling the Polish border, also a UNESCO site — is home to more than 800 European bison, the continent's heaviest land animal. Polotsk, first recorded in 862 and one of the earliest cities mentioned in the East Slavic lands, has the St. Sophia Cathedral and the Euphrosyne monastery, and the northern lake district around Braslaw is a quiet lake-and-forest landscape. Khatyn, north of Minsk, memorialises the wartime villages destroyed with their inhabitants.