After the (too) short trip to Kaliningrad, I continued with the same tour company, and some of the same group members, to Belarus. An easy border crossing in this time, and the tour leader seemed to be trying to build bridges with those he’d previously offended, so I was hopeful that this trip – a full week – would go according to plan.
& most of it did. Okay, so we didn’t get to visit the workshop of Ozgur, “one of the most esteemed sculptors of the USSR, his workshop full to the brim of monuments to Lenin, Soviet War heroes, and statues of other important communist figures from Kim II Sung to Fidel Castro”, nor to meet “our friend who supplies local film directors with uniforms and weapons of the Second World War. He will provide you with the uniform of a Red Army General and be able to take some fairly epic photos in the surrounding area” (this latter would not have interested me anyway) – and most importantly for most of us, at the Stalin Line (a series of bunkers on the line that marked the western edge of the Soviet Union, as a protection against attacks from the West), we were not able to “ride a Soviet tank around a mock battlefield”, as the tanks were being cleaned and polished ready for the big day commemorating the victory of the Soviets over the Germans that helped to end world War II. Something I would have liked to have done!
Minsk is a great city to visit. From the big Lenin statue outside the Belarusian Parliament Building, and many other monuments and statues (including this Fountain of Three Storks, in Independence Square), to its many churches and cathedrals, and quite interesting modern architecture. But probably the top sight is the rather sad Belarusian State Museum of the History of the Great Patriotic War. An impressive building/monument in itself (the pic at the top of the page is a close-up], but with some very sobering accounts, statistics and pictures of what Belarus suffered during the Second World War (what they refer to as ‘the Great Patriotic War’). According to the information in there, 209 out of the 270 Belarusian cities and district centres were destroyed, and 260 extermination camps and ‘decimation places’ were organised by the Nazis in the occupied Belarusian territory – with 206,500 civilians from Belarus and occupied Western Europe massacred in the largest death camp. In total, 2,357,000 people (1,547,000 civilians and 810,000 war prisoners) – 1 in 4 of the population – died in Belarus during the war.
We also visited the city of Brest, down by the Polish border. Only just, however, as we were instructed to be down in the hotel lobby at 05:50 with all our luggage, so as to complete check-out and collection of packed breakfasts by 06:00 and get to the train station in time for our 07:00 train, but one person didn’t appear – the tour leader. People tried calling his cellphone as well as the hotel phone in the room without response, and we eventually persuaded the reluctant hotel staff to give us a copy of his room key so that a member of our group could go in and get things moving. Thankfully he hadn’t suffered a heart attack or anything similar, he had simply slept through all alarms and calls, having got back to the hotel at 4am after a heavy night’s drinking (with two other members of the group who were downstairs by 05:50 as required)! He was shaken awake and threw his stuff into his bags … and we made the train with just three minutes to spare. & he did not apologise as he slunk onto the waiting bus, pausing only to swear at the group member he’d fallen out with on the Kaliningrad trip.
I'm glad we made it, as Brest was superb, really one of the highlights of the trip for me. The city itself was really pleasant, with charming little touches like the ‘place for kissing’ street sign, and the daily ritual of the old man who comes out in uniform each evening to collect the old iron ladder and light the gas street lamps, one-by-one, in the main pedestrian street - but the highlight was the Brest Hero Fortress complex, just outside the city. A complex that includes an impressive entrance monument, some remains of the fortress itself (two battle-scarred entrance gates with a few old buildings between them), the 100 metre high Bayonet Obelisk, an eternal flame guarded by uniformed teenage Pioneer Corp guards who take their role very seriously, a cathedral, a number of old tanks, and various impressive statues, including the enormous stone Courage monument. This picture below sort-of captures some elements of the complex.
Additionally, we visited the Belarusian side of the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl reactor. Very sad to see so many decaying buildings inside the zone, slowly falling to pieces as they are attacked by the elements – peoples’ homes, but also a school and kindergarten, a pharmacy, a farming equipment factory, etc. Those of us who wanted to climb the 93 steps went up a watch tower from where you could see the reactor in the distance, and we carried radiation level counters with us to see how the radiation spiked in certain places – still up to 18.2ϻSv/h at one place, against the 0.3ϻSv/h dose that is considered safe (but a few hours’ exposure to this higher dose is not a risk).
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