BELARUS
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Also known as Belarús or White Russia, Belarus is a country in Eastern Europe bordered by Lithuania and Latvia to the north, Russia to the east, Ukraine to the south, and Poland to the west. It is landlocked, and its essentially flat territory has three regions: the lakes in the north, the forests in the center, and the marshlands in the south. The capital is Minsk. The official language is Belarusian, but Russian is the most widely spoken. Minorities speak their native languages, which can be Polish, Ukrainian, and Eastern Yiddish among Jewish citizens who, before the Holocaust, represented 10% of the country's population.
Historically, Belarus has been a dominated territory, first by Slavic tribes, then by Varangians from Scandinavia. Centuries later, it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then the territory was occupied and divided between Austria, Prussia, and Tsarist Russia. In 1918, before the end of World War I, it gained independence under the name Belarusian People's Republic, but the joy lasted only ten months because it was taken by the Red Army of the Bolsheviks, resulting in it becoming one of the Soviet republics. This last fact caused the Belarusian identity, as well as its modern culture and architecture, to be more closely tied to Soviet-era remnants. Finally, in 1990, Belarus declared itself a sovereign republic and had its first elections. In 1994, new elections were held, and the elected president has been in power since then under an authoritarian style.
Belarus is not a country that has stood out worldwide in sports or the arts, and little is known about its achievements in science. However, in 2015, Svetlana Alexievich surprised the world by winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, which put her country in the spotlight. Her literature focuses on oral history, the rescue of life stories, the critique of authoritarian systems and wars, as well as social or political denunciation in cases such as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occurred in 1986.
Her book "Voices from Chernobyl," translated into Spanish, is available online through this link from the Division of Natural and Exact Sciences at the University of Guanajuato: http://www.dcne.ugto.mx/Contenido/MaterialDidactico/amezquita/Lecturas/Voces%20de%20Chernobil%20-%20Svetlana%20Aleksievich.pdf
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Belarusian traditional music has a strong influence from Russian popular music, as we can appreciate in this snippet, which we can enjoy with a cocktail called "White Russian":
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Image credits appear at the bottom of the corresponding image.
Text adaptation: Rosalba Márquez and Homero Adame
Belarus text translation into English: Pat Grounds