Khatyn, National war memorial in Minsk region, Belarus
Khatyn is a national memorial site in Minsk region, Belarus, recreating a settlement that vanished during the Second World War. Stone slabs mark the locations of former houses and concrete chimneys with bells stand where buildings once sheltered daily life.
On March 22, 1943, the inhabitants of the village were locked in a barn by German forces and collaborators before being burned alive. Only a handful survived this event, which later became the basis for the complex opened in 1969.
The Eternal Flame burns in a block of black granite from which three birches grow, not in a wreath at the entrance; it stands for the roughly quarter of Belarus's population killed in the Second World War. At the symbolic village entrance a six-metre bronze shows Iosif Kaminskij carrying his dead son Adam, and visitors lay red and white flowers on the tiled step before it.
The site lies about 60 kilometres north of Minsk on the road to Vitebsk, in Lahojsk district. The grounds are entered past the six-metre bronze sculpture, with the symbolic barn behind it and the cemetery of burnt villages further on. Allow time to walk between the house foundations and the memorial wall.
A cemetery beside the main path displays the names of 185 settlements that were likewise erased during the occupation and never rebuilt. Each name represents a community that vanished entirely and exists now only in memory.
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