The last and only remaining European country with a dictator reminds me of the irreversibly gone childhood. The food is not expensive and of supreme quality, all from local factories. Everything is Nice and Sweet, as if the Soviet Union was never gone. Time has frozen there.
Minsk was completely destroyed during WWII, they were even considering rebuilding it in another place. Only a few buildings remain from before the war.
As you can guess, there isn’t too much to see below ground. There is one big drain, the Nemiga river, and several less known. The metro is not deep – just below ground level, and isn’t really interesting. Nevertheless, it much more secure than in other cities – a fucking camera is installed in each shaft and at the forks of the only interline.
I was in Minsk some years before, staying at friends’ houses. And everything went well and we had fun.
But what I wanted to mention is the fact that Minsk police is not explorer-friendly. In 2012 a group of guys and girls from Moscow were not so lucky – they were dumb enough to announce their plans in the internet. They got arrested before actually getting anywhere, having a maximum of 10 days of prison for nothing. The full story of their failure is long and I’d rather tell you over a cup of beer. The news – googletranslated and incomplete –
The story in the news
Anyway, let’s have a look at the Secret and Most restricted Minsk underground =)
A red cable tunnel in a factory:
I actually added an above-ground photo. This is what the city looks like:
Communist ideals in real life. We were drinking on the roof of the house where the mustached dictator’s son has an apartment. We were not arrested.
A cable tunnel:
This is the rooftop on one of the “City gates” buildings. Highly decorated Stalin-time architecture is wonderful. There’s a statue at each of the four corners on the two towers, and many more.
The a pre-war piece of the Nemiga. The river itself is bigger and newer.
Random manhole.
And here goes their pretty metro construction. Due to limited funds the construction took a lot of time and was completed only in 2012.
