br23 blog - minsk, belarus

My online friend Konst published a very nice photo report from Bundestag. Apparently, in an underground tunnel under Spree they preserve many tiles with the inscriptions from Soviet soldiers. I’ve been to Berlin twice and walked around Bundestag, but didn’t know about that tunnel. Here’s one of the photos:

The writing in blue pen says: “Here was a Belarusian, Vankovich K.P.” (the word “Belarusian” is capitalized, although normally you shouldn’t capitalize such a noun).

It caught my attention because Vankovich is a famous Belarusian-”Polish” noble family from Minsk. Probably the most famous of them is Valentin Vankovich, who was born in 1799, a painter, a friend of Adam Mickiewicz and an acquaitance of Alexander Pushkin (the author of their famous portraits). What is even more interesting, in 1840 Vankovich worked in Berlin, copying works of German artists. He then died in 1842 from tuberculosis.

His sons were active participants of the 1863 anti-Russian uprising in Belarus.

I wonder whether that soldier Vankovich is in any way related to this noble family, and whether he knew that 100 years before that Valentine Vankovich was also in Berlin.

P.S. Unfortunately, the fate of Vankovich’s paintings is very typical for most of Belarus’ artwork [1]:

“Valentin Vankovich is one of the greatest Belarusian painters of the first half of the 19th century. Paradoxically, there is no original painting of Vankovich on the territory of Belarus. His paintings were taken abroad in the first half of the 20th century and now are exhibited in the museums of Paris, Vilnius, Krakow and others.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 10:16 am and is filed under Belarusian history, Deutschland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.