Introducing Vitsebsk

Vitsebsk (Vitebsk in Russian), 277km north of the capital, is in some ways the most intriguing and dynamic Belarusian city outside Minsk, mainly due to its artistic heritage. Marc Chagall was born here, studying under an unheralded master, Yudel Pyen, who opened the country's first art school here in 1897; the artists Vasili Kandinsky, Ilya Repin and Kasimir Malevich also spent some time in what was then a dynamic city.

Aside from this, the city boasts what even Minsk cannot - a sense of the past. Several small areas of pre-WWII houses lend a delicate elegance to the relatively hilly city sitting at the confluence of three rivers, the dramatic Dvina, and the smaller Vitba and Luchesa.

Its past, however, is as painful as that of other Belarusian cities. Its history goes back to the 6th-century Varangian explorers from Scandinavia who settled here. Part of the Princedom of Polatsk, Vitsebsk was also pulled into the sphere of Kyivan Rus, then fell under the Lithuanian and Polish umbrella before being finally pinched by Moscow.

It was burned to ashes by Ivan the Terrible in the mid-16th century, and was savagely razed in WWII, when only 118 people out of a prewar population of 170, 000 survived. Each year on 26 June, the city celebrates the day in 1944 when the Red Army liberated it from the Nazis. Though less developed than Minsk, Vitsebsk has a down-to-earth quality that visitors will appreciate.