I’ll be honest. Belarus wasn’t on my radar. Not even close.
After the chaos of Budapest’s goulash-soaked adventures and that weird, wonderful month I spent eating mutton in Mongolian gers until I couldn’t look at sheep anymore, I thought I’d seen enough of Eastern Europe’s Soviet leftovers. Turns out I was wrong. Because Belarus? It’s different. Quieter. Weirder in ways I didn’t expect.
The trip started in Minsk a city that feels like it’s stuck between wanting to be Moscow and wanting to just… exist and ended in a village called Krupitsa where an elderly woman taught me how to make cheese in her bathtub. I’m not making this up.
This rusted Ferris wheel was one of the first things I saw. Just sitting there in the trees like someone forgot about it mid-carnival. Welcome to Belarus.
Landing in Minsk: Soviet Buildings and Neon Signs
The thing about Minsk is that it doesn’t ease you in.
I landed late afternoon, October light already going dim. Took the metro which, by the way, doubles as a nuclear bunker because of course it does and emerged onto Independence Avenue. Wide. Impossibly wide. The kind of boulevard that makes you feel small on purpose.
Those twin towers? They’re called the Gates of Minsk. Built in 1953. Stalinist Classicism at it’s finest, which is a fancy way of saying “intimidating beige buildings that remind you the state is watching.” One has a clock, the other has the Belarusian coat of arms. They frame the entrance to the city center like a pair of sentries who’ve been standing there too long.
I wandered past them into the old town, though “old” is relative here. Most of Minsk got flattened in WWII like, 80% destroyed so what you’re seeing is reconstruction. Careful. Intentional. A little too perfect in places.
The waterfront district caught me off guard. Pastel-colored houses lined up like Lego blocks, church spires rising behind them, all of it reflected in the river. There was a bronze bird sculpture looked like a stork or maybe a crane perched on a war memorial. I stood there longer than I meant to. A couple locals were sitting on the concrete embankment, just… existing. No phones out. Just watching the water.
The Metro Built As A Bomb Shelter
Minsk’s metro is deep. Like, really deep. Built during the Cold War with dual purpose: public transport and bomb shelter. The escalators go down forever.
The stations are this weird mix of Soviet grandeur and modern advertising. Gold-lit columns, marble walls, chandeliers that belong in a palace then bam, a neon ad for some app I can’t read because it’s all in Cyrillic. People move through these spaces like it’s normal. Which I guess it is, for them.
I took the wrong line twice trying to get to the museum district. Nobody speaks English. Not in a rude way just in a “why would we?” way. I showed my phone to a woman who looked like somebody’s very stern grandmother. She sighed, pointed, said something that sounded like directions, then walked away before I could thank her.
Coffee and Books Near Soviet Monuments
By day two, I’d developed a routine. Wake up confused about where I was (hotel curtains were industrial-strength blackout), grab coffee, wander.
Found this place called Paragraph Coffee tucked into an exposed brick building. The kind of cafe that wouldn’t look out of place in Melbourne or Portland, except the menu’s in Russian and the barista looked mildly offended when I asked for oat milk. They had it, though. Progress.
There’s a bookstore near the river floor-to-ceiling shelves, that specific smell of paper and dust, a kid sitting cross-legged in the aisle reading something thick. I couldn’t read any of the titles but I bought a postcard anyway. Felt like the thing to do.
Independence Square and What Happened Here
Independence Square is massive. Ridiculous, actually. One of the largest public squares in Europe and it feels like it. Government buildings loom on one side, fountains on the other and in the center Lenin. Just standing there. Bronze, stoic, hand tucked into his coat like he’s waiting for a bus that’s never coming.
The architecture here is Stalinist baroque columns, symmetry, everything designed to make you feel like a very small cog in a very large machine. I walked around the fountains three times trying to figure out how I felt about it. Impressive? Sure. Oppressive? Maybe. Beautiful in a “this wasn’t built for comfort” kind of way? Definitely.
There were kids running around, couples taking selfies, an old man feeding pigeons. Life just… happening, despite the monuments.
The Holy Spirit Cathedral sits nearby, white and Orthodox and gleaming. Twin bell towers, golden dome, the works. I didn’t go inside wasn’t dressed for it but I watched people light candles through the doorway. The smell of incense drifted out.
Soviet Buildings With Street Art
One thing I didn’t expect: the street art.
There’s this residential building with a massive mural wrapping around the corner some kind of whimsical character, cartoonish, totally out of place against the Soviet concrete. Nobody seemed to think it was weird. Just another layer in a city that’s slowly figuring out what it wants to be.
I spent an afternoon walking through residential neighborhoods. Less tourists, more actual life. Playgrounds with faded paint. Corner stores with handwritten signs. A bus stop where three people stood in complete silence for ten minutes waiting for the 4671.
Public transport here is weirdly efficient. The buses are green, mostly clean and they actually run on time. I took one to the outskirts just to see what was out there. Answer: more apartment blocks, more trees, more of that autumn gold light filtering through birch leaves.
Museums and A Very Serious Opera House
I’m not usually a museum person. But Japan taught me that sometimes you need to sit with a country’s history to understand it’s present.
The museum I ended up at looked like the Bagdanovich Museum based on the neoclassical facade was quiet. Too quiet. A handful of visitors, mostly older folks. The interior was all rotunda ceilings and green pillars, stained glass throwing colored light across the floor. Collections of everything: old coins, traditional textiles, taxidermied animals that looked vaguely accusatory.
I spent maybe an hour there. Long enough to feel like I’d paid my respects to Belarusian history without fully understanding it.
Opera, Parks and The Sunset
The National Opera and Ballet Theatre is the kind of building that makes you stop walking.
Yellow facade, Corinthian columns, sculptures on the pediment depicting… I don’t know, probably something very noble and Soviet. I didn’t catch a performance tickets were sold out and also I was wearing hiking boots but I sat on the steps and watched people file in. Women in heels, men in suits. Everyone dressed like they’d been doing this since childhood.
The parks saved me that evening. I walked through one maybe Gorky Park, maybe not, I’d stopped checking my map and the light was doing that thing where it turns everything golden and soft. Trees half-bare, leaves crunching underfoot, a couple walking a dog that looked like it had given up on life.
Found a lake. Well, a river. People were out jogging, walking with kids, just sitting on benches staring at nothing in particular. There was this modern arena structure across the water all glass and curves sitting next to old Soviet blocks. Past and future in the same frame.
The Decision I Made Without Realizing It
Here’s how I ended up in a village nobody’s heard of: I got bored.
Not in a bad way. More like… Minsk was beautiful, sure, but also carefully curated. Museums and monuments and coffee shops that could exist anywhere. After four days, I was craving something messier. Something real.
A guy at the hostel Polish backpacker, here for reasons he didn’t explain mentioned his friend had family in the countryside. “Actual Belarus,” he said. “Not this.” He waved vaguely at the window, at the clean streets and working streetlights.
I asked where.
“Krupitsa,” he said, like it should mean something to me. It didn’t. Still doesn’t, really. There’s barely anything online about it. A village about an hour outside Minsk. Population maybe 3,000. Known for… nothing in particular.
“They make cheese,” he added.
That’s what sold me. Not the cheese specifically though I do love cheese but the randomness of it. The fact that someone would say “come to our village, we’ll show you how we make cheese” like it was a normal tourist activity.
Two days later I was on a bus heading out of the city.
The Countryside Had Other Plans
The bus was mostly empty. A few older women with shopping bags, a teenager with headphones, me with my backpack taking up too much leg room. We drove past Soviet apartment blocks, then newer suburbs, then suddenly fields. Just fields. Flat green turning gold, birch trees everywhere, those dramatic Belarusian skies that go on forever.
From above I took this photo on the way back you can see how abruptly the city just… stops. Orange apartment blocks clustered together, then nothing. Trees and more trees. The kind of landscape that makes you understand why Belarusians are quietly intense about their forests.
Krupitsa appeared slowly. Not like a village you enter more like the trees just gradually had houses between them. Single-story homes, most of them. Gardens. Dirt roads running parallel to paved ones. A church steeple poking up through the birch canopy.
The bus dropped me at what I guess was the center a few administrative buildings, a shuttered shop, a memorial. I stood there with my backpack feeling very obviously foreign. A dog wandered past, glanced at me, kept walking.
Then this woman appeared. Sixties, maybe seventies, wearing a floral housecoat and a scarf tied under her chin like every Eastern European grandmother in every photograph ever. She said something in Russian that I’m 90% sure meant “you the foreigner?”
I nodded.
She nodded back. “Come.”
Village Life Works Differently
Maria that’s her name or at least what I understood it to be walked fast for someone her age. We cut through a neighborhood of small homes, each one with a garden, a fence, a gate painted various shades of rust and hope.
Her place was at the end of a lane. Red fence, open gate, flowers still blooming despite the October chill. The house was small maybe three rooms with that particular aesthetic of “we’ve had this wallpaper since 1987 and it’s fine.” Pink kitchen, mismatched furniture, a wood stove that probably heated the whole place in winter.
Three other people were already there. Maria’s husband gray beard, sweater with a geometric pattern, the kind of quiet presence that suggests he’d lived through things and their daughter, plus someone’s cousin. I never got everyone’s names straight.
They fed me immediately. This is apparently non-negotiable in rural Belarus. Fried potato pancakes draniki that were crispy and perfect, some kind of pickled vegetable situation, bread, tea in mismatched cups. Nobody spoke English. I spoke maybe ten words of Russian. We communicated through gestures and smiles and that weird telepathy that happens when language isn’t an option.
The pancakes were ridiculous. I ate four. Maria looked satisfied.
The Market Set Up On Card Tables
Before we got to the cheese-making, Maria took me to what she called the “market.” I was expecting something quaint. A farmer’s market maybe, with craft vendors and organic labels.
What I got: shoes on a folding table. A tarp tied between posts. Clothes in piles. Everything slightly used, slightly faded, slightly “we’re making do with what we’ve got.” A few people browsing. Nobody in a hurry.
“Social market,” Maria’s daughter explained in halting English. “For people who need.”
I stood there holding a pair of sneakers I didn’t intend to buy, suddenly very aware of my Gore-Tex jacket and iPhone. She must have seen something on my face because she shrugged. “Is normal. Everyone helps.”
Later I learned these markets exist all over rural Belarus. Community-run. Informal. The kind of economic system that doesn’t show up in GDP reports but keeps people alive.
Cheese Made In Bathtubs
The cheese-making happened in the kitchen. And the bathroom. Both, actually.
Maria started by showing me the milk fresh from that morning, filtered through cheesecloth, still warm. She didn’t explain much. Just did things and waited for me to catch up. Pour the milk into a pot. Heat it slowly. Add something (vinegar? lemon juice? I couldn’t tell). Stir. Wait. Watch it separate into curds and whey like some kind of kitchen alchemy.
The whole house smelled like dairy and wood smoke.
She scooped the curds out, pressed them into a cloth, shaped them by hand. Her daughter brought over a wooden press handmade, old enough to be a family heirloom. They layered the cheese carefully, weight on top, let gravity do it’s work.
Then Maria led me to the bathroom where a dozen glass jars sat cooling in the bathtub. Milk. Just… milk. In a bathtub. Covered with cloth.
I must have looked confused because she laughed this dry, knowing laugh and said something that her daughter translated as “Where else would I keep it?”
Fair point.
War Memorials and What They Mean
We walked after that. Needed to, honestly my stomach was still processing all the draniki. Maria took me past the village center, past the church, to a memorial set back in a grove of trees.
Green panel. Bronze figures soldiers, workers, a woman holding a child. 1941-1945 in gold numbers on either side.
Nobody else was there. Just us and the leaves falling and that particular silence that feels like remembering.
Maria stood there longer than I expected. Didn’t say anything. Her husband put a hand on her shoulder. I stayed back, feeling like I was intruding on something private.
Later, on the bus back, I looked up the numbers. Belarus lost a quarter of it’s population in WWII. Every village has a memorial. Every family has a story. The past isn’t past here it’s just… present. Quiet. Built into the landscape.
The Old Cultural Hall
Before I left, Maria insisted on showing me the cultural center. “Concert hall,” she said, which felt ambitious for a village this size.
It was Soviet vintage. That specific palette of mint green and pale pink, chandeliers that belonged in a much fancier building, rows and rows of theater seats facing an empty stage. The ceiling had been repainted probably recently but everything else looked exactly like it had in 1975.
“We have shows,” Maria’s daughter said. “Sometimes.”
I believed her. The room had that lived-in feeling. Worn carpet, programs tucked into seat backs, a piano in the corner with sheet music still on the stand. This wasn’t a museum. People actually used this space.
We walked back through the village as the sun started dropping. Hills in the distance going purple, fields turning gold, the kind of landscape that tricks you into thinking nothing ever changes here. Which isn’t true. Everything changes. Just slowly. Deliberately. On a timeline that has nothing to do with the internet or global markets or whatever trend is currently eating the world.
What I Learned In Belarus?
I stayed in Krupitsa two days. Could have been two weeks. Time moved differently there not slower, exactly. Just… looser. Meals happened when people were hungry. Conversations ended when there was nothing left to say. Work got done because it needed doing, not because someone sent a Slack message.
Maria taught me how to recognize good milk by smell. How to press cheese so it doesn’t crumble. Which weeds in the garden were useful and which ones were just being stubborn. None of this is information I’ll probably ever need. I don’t have a farm. I buy cheese from Whole Foods in plastic packaging.
But knowing it matters anyway.
Before I left, I looked at the map. Krupitsa is just… there. A scatter of streets and houses and lives that don’t need explaining to outsiders. A place where people make cheese in bathtubs and sell shoes on folding tables and light candles for the dead and keep going.
Maria gave me a jar of cheese to take back to Minsk. Homemade. Still warm from pressing. I carried it on the bus like it was fragile, which it was not because it would break, but because it represented something I couldn’t quite name. Connection, maybe. Or just proof that I’d been somewhere real.
Going Back to Belarus
The bus ride back to Minsk felt longer than the one out. Maybe because I knew what was waiting clean streets, working WiFi, the comfortable anonymity of being a tourist again. Or maybe because leaving Krupitsa required shedding something I’d accidentally picked up. A pace. A way of being.
I sat in the back with Maria’s cheese jar wrapped in a scarf in my bag, watching the countryside scroll past in reverse. Fields to suburbs to apartment blocks to city. The progression felt inevitable. Wrong, somehow, but inevitable.
Hit the city center around 4 PM. Rush hour. People everywhere, buses pulling up every three minutes, that specific urban hum of everyone going somewhere with purpose. The contrast was jarring. Two days ago I’d watched an old man milk a cow by hand. Now I was dodging businessmen with briefcases and teenagers on scooters.
My hotel this yellow classical number with arched windows and the kind of facade that whispered “we were important once” felt almost absurdly luxurious. Hot shower. Actual water pressure. Sheets that didn’t smell like someone’s grandmother’s attic. I stood under the water for twenty minutes trying to process the whiplash.
Seeing The City Again
Funny thing about leaving and coming back: the place looks different.
I walked the same routes I’d walked before Independence Square, the waterfront, past the opera house but everything had shifted slightly. Or maybe I had. The monumentalism that felt oppressive before now just felt… there. Part of the landscape. Belarus doing it’s Belarus thing.
Evening light hit those twin towers again and I stopped to actually look at them this time. Not as Soviet relics or architectural statements. Just as buildings people walk past every day on their way to work or school or wherever. The clock still kept time. Buses still stopped. Life happened regardless of how I felt about the aesthetics.
There’s this thing where travel makes you think you understand a place and then you spend time there and realize you understand nothing and then if you’re lucky you stop trying to understand and just pay attention instead.
Lenin was still there. Still bronze. Still waiting. I sat on a bench near the fountains and watched tourists take selfies with him. A group of school kids walked past without looking up. He was part of the furniture now. Historical background radiation.
What Photos Can’t Capture?
I tried to find that bookstore again the one with the kid reading on the floor but couldn’t. Maybe I had the wrong street. Maybe it was closed. Or maybe some places only exist once, when you need them to.
Ended up at Paragraph Coffee instead. Same exposed brick. Same mildly judgmental barista. Ordered something with too much syrup this time because why not.
The table next to me: two women in their thirties, speaking Russian rapid-fire, laughing about something I couldn’t understand. They didn’t look like they were performing Belarus for tourists or wrestling with Soviet legacy or any of the narratives I’d been constructing in my head. They were just… drinking coffee. Having a Tuesday.
That’s the part travel writing doesn’t capture. The ordinariness. The fact that for everyone who lives here, this is just home. Not exotic. Not traumatic. Not a experience to be unpacked over lattes. Just the place where they buy groceries and complain about weather and occasionally make cheese in bathtubs.
What Museums Leave Out?
I went back to the museum had time to kill before my flight, needed somewhere quiet. Same green pillars, same stained glass, same feeling of being in a place designed to make you feel small.
But this time I noticed the other visitors. An older couple holding hands, moving slowly through the exhibits. A young guy sketching something in a notebook. A woman reading every single placard like she was studying for a test.
Museums try to freeze time, make it digestible. Here’s the folk costume. Here’s the war medal. Here’s what we were. But walking through after Krupitsa, all I could think about was Maria’s kitchen. The pink walls. The wood stove. The bathtub full of milk jars.
That’s what survives. Not the displays the doing. The handing down. The “this is how we’ve always done it” that adapts without announcing it’s adapting.
Zoning Out On The Metro
My last evening, I rode the metro for no reason. Just got on at one station, rode to the end of the line, came back.
The platforms are these cathedral spaces marble, chandeliers, everything gleaming under gold light. Built during the Cold War to double as bomb shelters, which means they’re deep. Escalators that go down forever. You have time to think on those escalators. Or not think. Just exist in the descent.
People read on the trains. Listen to music. Stare at their phones. Universal subway behavior. But there’s something about doing it 100 meters underground in a space designed to survive nuclear war that adds a layer. Resilience as architecture. Survival as everyday practice.
I got off at a random station didn’t even catch the name and walked. Residential neighborhood. Nothing special. Corner store with Cyrillic signs I couldn’t read. Kids playing basketball in a courtyard. Someone’s grandmother sweeping her doorstep at 7 PM.
This is where the real city lives. Not in the monuments or museums. In the in-between spaces. The parts tourists skip because they’re not picturesque enough.
What Leaving Cost Me?
Airport morning. I left the cheese in the hotel fridge with a note for the cleaning staff. Couldn’t bring it through customs and it felt wrong to throw it away. Hoped whoever found it would understand the gesture or at least enjoy some homemade farmer’s cheese.
The flight back was one of those connector nightmares Minsk to Warsaw to Munich to wherever I was going next. I lost track. Started writing notes on my phone, trying to capture details before they faded. The color of Maria’s kitchen. The sound of milk being poured. The weight of that Lenin statue’s bronze hand.
Here’s what I learned or think I learned or am still figuring out: places resist summarization.
Belarus isn’t “stuck in the past” like the think pieces claim. It’s not a “Soviet time capsule” or “Europe’s last dictatorship” or whatever reductive label gets slapped on it. It’s just… Belarus. A country where people live actual lives that have nothing to do with your travel narrative.
Minsk is both the Stalinist architecture and the trendy coffee shop. The opera house and the street art. The past and the present occupying the same space because that’s how time works when you’re not treating it like a museum exhibit.
Krupitsa is where I learned that cheese-making isn’t quaint. It’s practical. Necessary. The same way the social market isn’t charming it’s survival. Community infrastructure dressed up in shoes on folding tables.
What’s Wrong With Travel Writing?
I’m supposed to end this with some wisdom. Lessons learned. How Belarus changed me or taught me something profound about myself.
But honestly? I’m just tired. Grateful. Confused in that good way where you realize you understand less than you thought but that’s somehow okay.
I didn’t “discover” Belarus. I spent a week there. Saw some buildings. Ate some food. Made cheese with someone’s grandmother. That’s it. The country existed before I showed up and will continue existing long after I leave.
The best trips are the ones that remind you you’re not the main character. You’re just passing through. The story keeps going without you.
Last image I took before leaving: sunset through trees in some park whose name I never learned. Light filtering through birch branches. A couple on a bench. Nobody performing anything for anybody.
That’s Belarus. The parts I saw, anyway. The parts I’ll remember. The parts that probably don’t mean anything to anyone else but somehow mean everything to me.
Would I go back? Maybe. Probably not to Minsk I’ve done the city thing. But Krupitsa, yeah. If Maria would have me. If the bus still runs that route. If I can figure out how to say “thank you for the cheese and the bathtub milk and the reminder that the world is bigger than my understanding of it” in Russian.
Because that’s the thing nobody tells you about travel: it’s not about going places. It’s about getting small enough to fit through the gaps in your own assumptions.
Belarus made me small. In the best way.
Practical Information
- Getting There: Minsk National Airport has connections to most major European hubs. Visa situation changes depending on where you’re from check current requirements because Belarus plays by it’s own rules.
- Getting Around: Metro is cheap, efficient, confusing if you can’t read Cyrillic. Buses work. Marshrutkas (minibuses) work better if you can tell the driver where you’re going. Walking also works Minsk is walkable if you don’t mind the distances.
- Language: Almost nobody speaks English. Russian and Belarusian are your options. Google Translate saves lives. Pointing also works.
- Money: Belarusian rubles. ATMs exist. Credit cards work in cities, cash rules everywhere else. It’s cheaper than you expect.
- Krupitsa: Not set up for tourists. Like, at all. If you go, have a contact. Or be very good at improvising. The cheese is worth it though.
- What to Eat: Draniki (potato pancakes). Solyanka (soup). Kvass (fermented drink that tastes like bread). Anything someone’s grandmother makes. Avoid nothing it’s all carbs and dairy and your body will adjust.
- When to Go: Autumn (September-October) hits different. Spring is muddy. Summer is brief but golden. Winter is very, very winter.
- What Nobody Tells You: Bring cash. Download offline maps. Don’t expect things to be easy. Do expect them to be memorable.
- And if someone offers you homemade cheese? Say yes.
Daily Costs Comparison: Minsk vs Krupitsa
| Category | Minsk | Krupitsa |
| Accommodation | $30-50 | $0-15 (homestay) |
| Food | $15-25 | $5-10 |
| Transport | $2-5 | $1-2 |
| Activities | $10-20 | $0 (life is the activity) |
| Coffee | $3-4 | $0.50 (if you find it) |
Total: Minsk ($60-100/day) vs Krupitsa ($10-30/day)
Note: Costs in Krupitsa depend heavily on how much hospitality you’re offered. Maria charged me nothing. I left money anyway. Economics work differently there.