"DZIADY," A TRADITIONAL ALL SOULS' DAY WAS HELD IN MINSK, BELARUS

"Dziady," an ancient Slavic fest of commemoration the ancestors (all souls' day), traditionally celebrated on November 1. For every year thousands of Belarusians are taking part in a patriotic march from Chelyuskinites Park to Kurapaty, a wooded area on the outskirts of Minsk, in which a vast number of Belarussian freedon fighters were executed between 1937 and 1941 by the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. 

The patriotic action was organized by the Conservative Christian Party of the Belarusian People’s Front. The march traditionally ended with a rally at the cemetary in Kurapaty forest.

The rally was opened by Valer Buyval, a representative of the Conservative Christian Party of the Belarusian People’s Front, who delivered a message from the party’s leader Zyanon Pazniak.

The fact that Historian Pazniak’s unveiled the dark past of Kurapaty and further exhumation of the remains in 1988 gave an added momentum to the pro-democracy and pro-independence movement in Belarus in the last years of the USSR.

In 1996, Zyanon Pazniak led the first mass protests against the methods of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s rule, which later became known as Spring 1996. After a wave of political repression, he emigrated to the West.

 

"Halloween? No, thanks, I have my native feast, Dziady!" street-art in Minsk

By the materials of Belsat