[Edit] World Heritage Sites

Russian Orthodox church in Brest, Belarus

Belarus has four World Heritage Sites, with two of them being shared between Belarus and its neighboring countries. The four are: the Mir Castle Complex; the Niasviž Castle; the Belovezhskaya Pushcha (shared with Poland); and the Struve Geodetic Arc (shared with Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Moldova, Russia, Sweden and Ukraine). ^[6]

[Edit] Literature

See also: List of Belarusian writers

Belarusian literature began with 11th- to 13th-century religious writing; the work of 12th-century poet Kiryla Turauski is representative.^[8] Rhyming was common in these works,^{[citation needed]} which were generally written in Old Belarusian, Latin, Polish or Church-Slavic.^[9] By the 16th century, Polatsk resident Francysk Skaryna translated the Bible into Belarusian. It was published in Prague and Vilnius between 1517 and 1525, making it the first book printed in Belarus or anywhere in Eastern Europe.^[10] The modern period of Belarusian literature began in the late 19th century; one important writer was Yanka Kupala. Many of the writers at the time, such as Uładzimir Žyłka, Kazimir Svayak, Yakub Kolas, Źmitrok Biadula and Maksim Haretski, wrote for a Belarusian language paper called Nasha Niva, published in Vilnius. After (Eastern) Belarus was incorporated into the Soviet Union, the government took control of Belarusian culture,^[vague] and until 1939 free development of literature occurred only in the territories incorporated into Poland (Western Belarus).^[10] Several poets and authors went into exile after the Nazi occupation of Belarus, not to return until the 1960s.^[10] In post-war literature, the central topic was World War II (known in Belarus as the Great Patriotic War), that had particularly left particularly deep wounds in Belarus (Vasil Bykaŭ, Ales Adamovich etc); the pre-war era was also often depicted (Ivan Melezh). A major revival of the Belarusian literature occurred in the 1960s with novels published by Vasil Bykaŭ and Uładzimir Karatkievič.

[Edit] Theater

Belarusian theater also began gain popularity in the early 1900s. One of Belarus's most famous plays, Paulinka (written by Yanka Koupala), was performed in Siberia for the Belarusians who were being sent to the region. ^[7] Documentation of Belarusian folk music stretches back to at least the 15th century. Prior to that, skomorokhs were the major profession for musicians. A neumatic chant, called znamenny, from the word 'znamia', meaning sign or neume, was used until 16th century in Orthodox church music, followed by two hundreds of stylistic innovation that drew on the Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. In the 17th century, Partesnoe penie, part singing, became common for choruses, followed by private theaters established in cities like Minsk and Vitebsk. Popular music groups that came from Belarus include Pesniary, Dreamlin and NRM. Currently, there are 27 professional theater groups touring in Belarus, 70 orchestras, and 15 agencies that focus on promoting concerts.

In 2005, playwrights Nikolai Khalezin and Natalya Kolyada founded the Belarus Free Theatre, an underground theatre project dedicated to resisting Belarussian government pressure and censorship. The group performs in private apartments and at least one such performance was broken up by special forces of the Belarusian police^[11] The Belarus Free Theatre has attracted the support of notable Western writers such as Tom Stoppard, Edward Bond, Václav Havel, Arthur Kopit and Harold Pinter.