Pinsk

The well-known Russian poet Alexander Block has compared Pinsk to the fantastic town of Kitezh. The architectural dominant of the town is the former Franciscan Church and nowadays the Cathedral of Assumption of Saint Virgin Mary. Set on the hill on the Pina embankment with a ladder lively descending to the river, the pliant architectural ensemble holds the panorama of all the historical part of Pinsk.

The Cathedral was founded six centuries ago. Brick took the place of wood in the beginning of the XVIth century, and then Cathedral used to be destroyed and built up again from century to century. That is why today it is possible to trace the Gothic-Renaissance brickwork of the walls, the refined late Baroque decor of the main facade, and the tumult of a Rococo fantasy interior. The sparkling of gold and silver interior filled with a set of sculptures of angels and saints and icons (among them is Madonna of Pinsk by Alfred Romer) leads a pathetic talk with everyone who crosses the threshold of the Small Basilica submerged in the sounds of magnificent organ. This honorable title is given by Pope to the chosen Catholic temples as the testimony of their special importance. Pinsk relic received it in 1996, just to the 600^th anniversary.

Residential area of the XIXth – early XXth centuries adjoins the walls of Franciscan cloister. These old quarters take us to the times when Pinsk was populated mostly by Hebrew. The names of some families from Pinsk and Pinsk region have already become the possession of world history. The specific and vivid stratum of the city’s subculture is carefully reproduced in one of the exposition halls of the local Museum of Culture of Belarusian Polessye housed in an exquisite building of a former Jesuit collegium.

Following the wonderful embankment you get to the eastern part of the city where a regularly planned huge green manor of Carolin Suburb was previously situated. The Archangel Michael Church of the end of the XVIIIth century reminds of the Bernardian cloister that used be here. And next to the cloister settled ...

monks-communists. Members of that original Catholic order lived in a community (commune) and had common income. Their only representation in the Grand Principality of Lithuania was in Pinsk – the Carl Baromeush Roman-Catholic Church. Today the building hosts a concert hall and a showroom simultaneously.