Vitebsk & the North

The north is where Belarusian history begins. Polotsk, on the Western Dvina, is recorded in the chronicles in 862, and by the 10th century it was the seat of a principality ruled by Rogvolod, whose daughter Rogneda was forcibly married to Vladimir of Kyiv. Under Vseslav, remembered as "the Sorcerer", Polotsk rivalled Kyiv and Novgorod in the 11th century and built its own Cathedral of St Sophia. In the 12th century the princess Euphrosyne founded a convent, a school and a scriptorium, and she is now one of the country's most revered saints. Vitebsk, upstream, grew as a trading town on the Dvina route to the Baltic.

Both towns passed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and then the Commonwealth. Francysk Skaryna, born in Polotsk, printed his Bible translations in Prague from 1517, the start of Belarusian printing. Ivan the Terrible took Polotsk in 1563 until Stefan Batory recovered it in 1579, and the battle of Orsha in 1514, a Lithuanian victory over Muscovy, remains a touchstone of national memory. The first partition of 1772 brought the region into the Russian Empire.

Vitebsk became a busy Jewish town in the Pale of Settlement, where Marc Chagall, born nearby in 1887, grew up. After 1917 he founded a People's Art School there, and Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky briefly made it a centre of the Russian avant-garde. In the Second World War the region's forests sheltered large partisan forces and the Jewish population was destroyed; much of old Vitebsk was destroyed before its liberation in June 1944.

The north carries a particular sense of antiquity: Polotsk is treated as the cradle of Belarusian statehood, and Euphrosyne's relics, returned to the convent in 1910, draw Orthodox pilgrims from across the country and beyond. The region's population is largely Orthodox, with Catholic parishes in the west around Braslaw and Hlybokaye.

Vitebsk is the country's artistic city. Chagall's floating lovers and wooden houses are painted from its streets, and although he left in the early 1920s, the city now celebrates him with museums, murals and statues. The legacy of Malevich's Suprematism shows up in local design and exhibitions. Every July the Slavianski Bazaar festival, held since 1992, fills the summer amphitheatre with pop and folk acts from across the Slavic world, and it remains the region's biggest event.

In the villages of the Lakeland, older customs linger: fishing and boat-building crafts, flax spinning and linen weaving, Kupalle fires by the water at midsummer, and choirs of older women singing seasonal songs. Russian is the everyday language of the cities, while Belarusian is heard more in the countryside.

Vitebsk, with about 360,000 people, is the regional capital and one of the largest cities in Belarus, spread along both banks of the Dvina. Orsha, a railway town of about 100,000, Navapolatsk, a planned Soviet oil city of about 100,000, and Polotsk, with about 80,000, follow; the Braslaw and Hlybokaye districts are sparsely populated lake and forest country.

The economy combines industry with farming and forestry. Navapolatsk has the Naftan refinery, one of the country's two big oil refineries, and Vitebsk has a range of factories. Dairy, flax and timber dominate the countryside, and tourism matters around Polotsk and the lakes. As elsewhere, sanctions and the closed border with the EU have hurt trade, while links with Russia, immediately to the east, have grown.

Life in Vitebsk has a university and art-school edge, with students, galleries and cafés in the centre. Villages are ageing and emptying, and in summer the lake shores fill with Belarusian families camping, fishing and grilling for the weekend.

Northern cooking is the national table adjusted to a cooler, lake-filled land. Fish is more prominent here than anywhere else in Belarus: pike, bream, perch, tench and eel from the Braslav lakes and the Dvina are fried, baked, smoked or simmered into yushka, a clear fish soup cooked over a fire on the shore. Smoked fish is sold at roadside stalls in summer.

Flax country also means linseed oil, which dresses potatoes, sauerkraut and boiled vegetables, and the forests supply mushrooms, cranberries, lingonberries and bilberries in quantity. Heavy winter food — kletski, dumplings in broth, potato babka, pork with machanka gravy, sauerkraut soup — suits the long cold months, and kholodnik, cold beetroot and kefir soup, comes out on hot days.

Vitebsk's bakeries and confectioners turn out honey cakes and pastries, and in Polotsk's monastery shops honey, bread and herbal teas are sold. Kvass, birch sap in spring and home-made berry nalivka, a sweet fruit liqueur, are the typical drinks, with samahon offered at village tables.

Polotsk is compact and rewarding. On the high bank of the Dvina stands the Cathedral of St Sophia, founded in the 11th century and rebuilt in Baroque form in the 18th, now a museum and concert hall with an organ. The Convent of St Euphrosyne holds the 12th-century Church of the Transfiguration with its original frescoes and the saint's relics, and the town adds a museum of Belarusian book printing, the Epiphany Cathedral and a monument marking a claimed geographical centre of Europe.

Vitebsk, Chagall's home town, has his family's house, now a museum, and the Marc Chagall Art Centre with his graphic works. The town hall, the Annunciation Church on the river, the Resurrection Church and the summer amphitheatre are all close to the centre, and outside the city lies Zdravnyova, the country estate of the painter Ilya Repin. Orsha has an old Jesuit college.

In the north-west, Braslav Lakes National Park spreads over dozens of glacial lakes, among them Drivyaty, Snudy and Strusta, with islands, pine hills and the view from Castle Hill above Braslaw. Hlybokaye has its Baroque Carmelite church, and the Berezinsky Biosphere Reserve, partly in the region's south, protects bog, forest, beaver and elk.