Minsk

The vast Independence Square, one of the largest in Europe, marks the south-western end of the city's main avenue. Around it stand the House of Government, a severe constructivist block of the early 1930s that survived the war, with a statue of Lenin in front, and the main building of the Belarusian State University. On its western corner rises the Church of Saints Simon and Helena, universally called the Red Church: a tall Catholic church of dark red brick, built between 1905 and 1910 and funded by a local landowner in memory of two of his children who died young. Its spiky tower is a striking contrast to the Soviet grandeur all around.

TipAvoid photographing the House of Government or any police and security staff; government buildings count as sensitive sites under Belarusian law.

The Upper Town is the closest Minsk comes to an old town: a small hill above the Svislach where the medieval market square, now Freedom Square, was laid out. Its white town hall was demolished on the orders of the Russian imperial authorities in the 1850s and rebuilt in 2004, a symbol of the city's old Magdeburg rights of self-government. Around the square are baroque churches and former monasteries, a restored row of merchants' houses, cafés and the bronze model of the old town. It's small, but it's the best place to imagine the trading city that existed before the twentieth century.

On a rise at the edge of the Upper Town, the twin white towers of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit are one of the city's most recognisable sights. The church was built in the seventeenth century for a convent of Bernardine nuns, in the baroque style typical of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and later became the main Orthodox cathedral of Belarus. Its most revered treasure is the icon of the Mother of God of Minsk, which tradition says was carried here from Kyiv. Services are frequent and atmospheric, with unaccompanied choral singing.

TipDress modestly; women usually cover their heads and wear skirts below the knee. Don't photograph during services without permission.

Just across the river from the Upper Town, the Trinity Suburb is a short stretch of pastel two- and three-storey houses with tiled roofs, reconstructed in the 1980s on the pattern of the nineteenth-century merchant quarter that once stood here. Its cobbled lanes hold small shops, a literary museum and riverside cafés, and from the embankment there are good views back towards the cathedral towers. It's easily covered in half an hour, but it makes a gentle pause between the monumental squares.

Reached by a footbridge from the Trinity Suburb, this small artificial island in the Svislach holds the memorial to soldiers from Belarus who died in the Soviet war in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989. A small chapel is surrounded by bronze figures of grieving mothers, sisters and widows, and a little statue of a weeping angel stands nearby. Despite its sadness, the island is also a place where wedding parties come to have photographs taken, a sign of how deeply memorials are woven into everyday life here.

Minsk had one of the largest Jewish communities in the region before the war, and the Nazi occupiers created one of the biggest ghettos in occupied Soviet territory here. On 2 March 1942 several thousand Jews were shot at this pit, known simply as the Yama. An obelisk raised in 1947 carries an inscription in Yiddish, then rare in the Soviet Union, and a bronze sculpture of 2000 shows a line of figures walking down the steps to their deaths. It's a short walk west of the Trinity Suburb, close to the site of the former ghetto, and one of the most important Holocaust memorials in Eastern Europe.

TipVisit quietly and respectfully; visitors traditionally leave small stones rather than flowers.

Founded in 1942, while the fighting was still going on, this was the first museum anywhere devoted to the Second World War. Since 2014 it has occupied a striking building on Pobediteley Avenue, its façade shaped like a fan of rays and topped by a glass dome, beside Victory Park and the Minsk Hero City obelisk. Its galleries trace the war from the first days of the German invasion in 1941 through the partisan movement, the destruction of villages and towns and the liberation of 1944, with tanks, aircraft, personal letters, a reconstructed partisan camp and powerful dioramas. Expect a Soviet and Belarusian state perspective on the story.

TipAllow at least two to three hours. Audio guides and English labels are limited, so a guided tour can help; the museum's website lists working hours and ticket prices.

Back on Independence Avenue, Victory Square is the city's main memorial to the war: a tall granite obelisk crowned with the Soviet Order of Victory, with an eternal flame burning at its foot and an underground hall of memory lined with the names of decorated soldiers and partisans. Newly married couples lay flowers here, and on 9 May, Victory Day, and 3 July, Independence Day, the square is the focus of official ceremonies.

The avenue that runs some fifteen kilometres from Independence Square to the north-eastern edge of the city is the purest expression of post-war Minsk. Its central section, rebuilt in the late 1940s and 1950s, is a near-continuous ensemble of socialist-classical architecture: colonnaded apartment blocks, towers topped with spires and stars, the circus, the main post office and the Central Department Store, all faced in cream and ochre stone with sculpted ornament. The architectural ensemble has been placed on the UNESCO tentative list. Walk from October Square past Central Square to Victory Square and Yakub Kolas Square to take in the best stretch.

TipMetro line 1 runs beneath Independence Avenue, with stations at most of its main squares, so it's easy to walk one stretch and ride the next.

Out in the north-eastern suburbs, the National Library opened in 2006 in one of the city's most eye-catching buildings: a glass-clad rhombicuboctahedron, a gem-like polyhedron, rising more than twenty storeys above a podium. At night its façade becomes a giant LED screen. An observation deck near the top gives a sweeping view over the city, the river and the surrounding forest, and there is a small museum of the book with rare manuscripts and early printed works, among them editions linked to Francysk Skaryna, the sixteenth-century Belarusian printer.

TipThe Uschod metro station is the nearest stop; check opening hours for the observation deck in advance.

About fifty kilometres north-east of Minsk, in a clearing in the woods, the State Memorial Complex at Khatyn marks the site of a village destroyed on 22 March 1943. Members of a German-led police battalion and an SS unit herded its inhabitants into a barn and set it alight; 149 people were killed, among them 75 children. The memorial, opened in 1969, stands for all of the hundreds of Belarusian villages burned during the occupation. A bronze figure of a man carrying his dead son stands over the site; where each house stood, a concrete chimney rises, with a bell that tolls at intervals; and the Cemetery of Villages holds symbolic graves for 186 villages that were never rebuilt.

TipThis is a place of mourning: keep voices low and do not climb on the memorials. The complex's website lists its opening days, which usually exclude Monday.

Around ninety kilometres south-west of Minsk, Mir Castle is a fairy-tale fortress of red brick and white stone, with five towers around a courtyard and a lake and gardens beside it. Building began around the turn of the sixteenth century under the Ilinich family; it passed to the Radziwiłłs, who added a Renaissance palace, and was later damaged in the Napoleonic wars and restored. UNESCO inscribed it in 2000 as an outstanding example of Central European castle building. Inside, a museum recreates residential rooms, cellars and exhibitions on the castle's owners, and the small town of Mir nearby has an old Jewish quarter and a former yeshiva.

TipMir and Nesvizh are about thirty kilometres apart and are usually combined in a single day trip from Minsk by car or organised tour.

For four centuries Nesvizh was the main seat of the Radziwiłł family, one of the most powerful dynasties of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their palace, rebuilt in the Renaissance and baroque styles around a courtyard and surrounded by moats, ponds and landscaped parks, was used as a sanatorium in Soviet times and restored in the 2000s; its rooms now display portraits, furniture and hunting trophies. Nearby, the Corpus Christi Church, built in the late sixteenth century, is one of the earliest baroque churches in Eastern Europe, and its crypt holds the coffins of dozens of Radziwiłłs. The palace complex was added to the UNESCO list in 2005.

On Belarus's border with Poland, roughly 350 kilometres south-west of Minsk, the nineteenth-century fortress of Brest was the first Soviet position attacked on 22 June 1941, and its garrison held out for weeks after the front had moved far to the east. The memorial built in the 1970s is on a gigantic scale: a star-shaped entrance cut through the ramparts, a colossal stone head of a soldier, an obelisk and an eternal flame, set among the ruins of barracks, gates and a garrison church. The city of Brest itself is pleasant, with a pedestrianised main street and a railway museum.

TipBrest is reached from Minsk in roughly three to four hours by fast train with Belarusian Railway, making it a base for Belovezhskaya Pushcha.

North of Brest, straddling the Polish border, lies one of the last and largest remnants of the primeval lowland forest that once covered much of Europe: huge oaks, ash and spruce, bogs and meadows. The Belarusian and Polish sides together form a single UNESCO World Heritage site, Białowieża Forest. It is the stronghold of the European bison, or zubr, which was hunted to extinction in the wild by the early twentieth century and reintroduced from zoo animals; several hundred now roam the Belarusian side. The park's visitor area at Kamenyuki has a nature museum, open-air enclosures with bison, elk and wild boar, cycling and walking trails, and the house of Ded Moroz, the Slavic Father Frost, which is popular with families.

TipHiring a bicycle at Kamenyuki is the best way to explore the forest trails. Book accommodation and guided wildlife outings through the national park itself.