The ‘Versailles of Belarus’: Inside the Unimaginable Tale of a Ruined Palace, Meddlesome Aristocrats, and a Jewish Industrial Dynasty
In a remote corner of a remote corner of the world, there sits, barely, the ruins of a legendary palace. A vision right out of a Piranesi etching, it is all crumbling bricks and the bare essentials of grand neoclassical architecture—arched colonnades, a symmetrical central facade, and a pediment daring the wind to blow just a little harder. It is one of Europe’s greatest modern ruins—and you can often have it to yourself.
Dubbed the Versailles of Belarus, Ruzhany Palace was the seat of one of Eastern Europe’s most powerful and storied families, the Sapieha, before it became a textile factory for the Pines, one of the region’s most influential Jewish families. It burned down in an accident during World War I, and despite a later attempt to rebuild it, it became a hollowed-out witness as the Nazis wiped out two-thirds of the town’s population because they were Jews.
My discovery of the ruins was purely an accident. A car rental agent in Minsk suggested if I was bored, I might want to check it out. Then, over the ensuing months, as I dove into translations of Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew texts to try to piece together the story of this beguiling ruin, I realized I’d found the key to a mystical and fascinating world—the great power that was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.