A return trip to Minsk – A charged highlight of the year

Not many blog posts this year, even though there was an abundance of beautiful moments… Yes, we wrote about our wedding in March, we even shortly mentioned our honeymoon, but then only April started…

Sure, we could send you lovely pictures from our relaxed holiday on the Polish coast. We enjoyed the sea, the beach, rest, long walks, and so on. But it’s hard to be original about things like that.

More important this year was intensive family contact. Not only the traditional family weekend in the Netherlands in June, or the visit from Reinier’s parents to Poland for Tatiana’s birthday in September, or the visit to Reinier’s suddenly seriously ill father in December… No, a heavy yet meaningful highlight of this year was ten days in Minsk. For the first time, real contact with Tatiana’s father and sister, meeting various friends, immersing ourselves in Belarusian society – so close to, and yet so far from Polish society – and all of this because Lukashenko some time ago decided not to issue passports outside his country anymore… So for a passport, that would expire anyway next year, which needed a new surname, it became: a return trip to Minsk!

We were glad we could do it together this Summer. There are reasons why Tatiana had to leave the country in early 2023, and if we were to be confronted with those, we very much preferred to face them together. And in that case, a Dutch passport might come in handy.

This won’t be a full travel report – partly because I’m applying a form of mild self-censorship – but I certainly don’t want to withhold some impressions and highlights from you:

• Fancy a real border experience? Try Terespol–Brest sometime! 😊 Every EU citizen may enter the country without a visa for up to 10 days, but it’s far from straightforward. Being sent from one place to another, lots of waiting, even more checks – including your wallet – and when you think after 8 hours you’re finally done, you’re told to join a two-hour queue for the X-ray tunnel your car has to go through…

• And then, when you drive into Brest at 3 am, you suddenly see a very modern city, with wide, smooth roads, only… really every single car does have Belarusian license plates. In ten days in Belarus, we literally saw, next to our own Volkswagen, two (!) cars with an EU flag on their plates… You really have entered another world!

• I had always understood that Poland suffered the most of all European countries during the Second World War, with 20% of the population killed and Warsaw completely destroyed. Belarus was not an independent country at the time, but the percentage there was around 27%… And in Minsk they didn’t even bother to restore anything to its original state. No beautiful old town like in Warsaw or Poznań – instead, Minsk is a city of wide avenues in a typical Soviet style. Different, but very neatly maintained!

• We visited a few government buildings… Those were special experiences. And we’ll leave it at that for now. But Tatiana did receive her new passport! Hallelujah!

The contact with Tatiana’s father and sister was beautiful – we were happy and grateful to be able to experience this together.

Attending the service together and being allowed to bring the message together in the church where Tatiana held a leading position for 30 years was deeply moving.

Together, we organized an additional reception in one of the other church buildings just outside the city for close friends who were unable to obtain visas for our wedding in March – friends who offered more intercessory prayer for us than we could ever offer for them… Incredible!

And together we enjoyed a surprise from Tatiana… Watching Swan Lake at the National Theatre in Minsk! No, when it comes to ballet, they really do understand it better in Eastern Europe. Wow!

And yes, the fact that in many situations you still have to watch your words… That makes the experience very double-edged.. Happy for everything and everyone we saw, but extremely grateful when, after another eight-hour battle of exhaustion, we reached the other side of the border again, this time the Lithuanian – where Belarusian license plates are not allowed to cross – for which we decided after learning that the waiting time at Brest was over four days…

What struck me in Poland in the late 1980s — then a closed country, with stern faces on the street but incredible warmth and hospitality once you were inside — I saw again now in Minsk. What wonderful people live there: kind, involved, warm, hospitable — and… brave!

So close — after all, the Netherlands is farther away in terms of kilometers — and yet so unreachable… They have my heart!