Attractions

Although Vitebsk suffered much from numerous wars, some interesting sights are saved such as: Rathaus (Coloncha, former City Hall) (1775), Governor's palace (before 1772), St.Barbara's Catholic church (1785, rebuild in end of XIX), St.Michael church (XVIII century), some buildings of Basilian and Bernardin Catholic monasteries (XVIII century) and some nice quarters of old town.

Blagoveshchenskaya Church was built at the end of the 12th century. It is situated in the territory of the former Lower Castle. The former palace of the governor (end of the 18th century) was the residence of all governors of Vitebsk Province. In 1812 Napoleon stayed here. A monument was built near the palace. It was devoted to the victory of the Russian people in the Patriotic War in 1812. Kazanskaya Church was built in 1760. It is on the right bank of the Western Dvina River.

The city long preserved one of the oldest buildings in the country: the Annunciation Church. This magnificent six-pillared building dates back to the period of Kievan Rus. It was constructed in the 1140s, rebuilt in the 14th and 17th centuries, repaired in 1883 and destroyed by the Communist administration in 1961. Scarce remains of the church were conserved until 1992, when it was restored to its presumed original appearance, although it's a moot point how the church looked like when it was first built.

Churches from the Polish-Lithuanian period were likewise destroyed, although the Resurrection Church (1772–77) has been rebuilt. The Orthodox cathedral, dedicated to the Intercession of the Theotokos, was erected in 1760. There are also the town hall (1775); the Russian governor's palace, where Napoleon celebrated his 43rd birthday in 1812; the Neo-Romanesque Roman Catholic cathedral (1884–85); and an obelisk commemorating the centenary of the Russian victory over Napoleon.

Education

The main universities of Vitebsk are Vitebsk State Technological University, Vitebsk State Medical University and Vitebsk State University named in honor of Pyotr Masherov.

Notable people

Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, physicist, 2000 Nobel Prize Winner for Physics

Marc Chagall, artist

El Lissitzky, artist

Yehuda Pen, artist

Leon Kobrin, playwright

Marcelo Koc (1918–2006), composer

Immanuel Velikovsky, psychiatrist/psychoanalyst and author

Kazimierz Siemienowicz, engineer, pioneer of rocketry

Simeon Strunsky (born 1879), author in New York City

Joseph Solman (born 1909), American painter

Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk (born 1730), Hasidic Rebbe

Isser Harel (1912-2003), Israel intelligence chief

Tanya Dziahileva (born 1991), model

Leonid Afremov, artist

Lazar Lagin, writer

Sergei Kornilenko, footballer

Max Danish (1881-1964), labor journalist, editor "Justice" (ILGWU)

Valery Gaydenko, artist, guitarist

A famous Russian painter Iliya Repin lived and worked near Vitebsk during some years in the end of XIX century. Some of his works are presented at the Vitebsk art museum.

Vitebsk was the native land of Mark Chagall, the world famous artist. He was inspired by his native town, which he often depicted in his works. In January 1991, Vitebsk celebrated the first Chagall Plain air Festival of Arts. In June 1992, a monument to Chagall was erected on his native Pokrovskaja street and a memorial inscription placed on the wall of his house.

Marc Chagall, born Moishe Shagal, was born in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk on 7th July 1887. He was a Russian-French artist associated with several major artistic styles and one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. It is difficult to characterize Chagall's art. He was very involved with the avant-garde but his work was consistently on the fringes of popular art movements and emerging trends, including Cubism, Fauvism and Surrealism. He was an early modernist, and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints. Marc Chagall was arguably one of the most famous Belarusians of all times. Key to the development of 20th century Belarus art, Chagall is known around the world for his surrealist paintings.

Chagall studied in St Petersburg before leaving for Paris in 1910. He returned to Vitebsk in 1914 and married his fiancée Bella before the outbreak of the World War 1. After the Revolution in 1917 he was appointed Commissar of Art for Vitebsk and founded the city’s School of Art. In 1920 he went to Moscow and from there back to Paris. His work was denounced by the Nazis and when war broke out he moved to the US with his wife. When she died in 1944 he stopped painting for some years. In the 1960sChagall designed stained glass windows for Hadassah University Medical Centre in Jerusalem and went on to create windows around the world including in Germany, France and the UK. Marc Chagall died in France in 1985.

The Marc Chagall Museum

The Marc Chagall Museum opened in 1992 and is one of the most interesting museums in Belarus with more than 300 original works of art including:

lithographs

xylographs

etchings

aquatints

illustrations to Nikolai Gogol’s poem Dead Souls

The museum also houses a number of reproductions of some of Chagall’s most famous works.

Marc Chagall Art Center

Established in 1992, it constantly exhibits graphic works by Marc Chagall (lithographs, wood cuts, etchings, aquatints). The Art Center's collection consists of the series of illustrations to Nikolay Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" (1923-1925), the series of colour lithographs from the Bible Series, made in 1956 and 1960, the cycle of colour lithographs "The 12 Tribes of Israel" (1960) and other works by Marc Chagall.

Home of Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall spent his yearly days in the house in Pokrovskaia street, built by the artist's father in yearly 1900ieths. The Home Museum was inaugurated in 1997. Its collection consists of household articles used at the turn of XIX-XX cc., as well as copies of archival documents and works by Chagall, relating to the artist and his family's life in Vitebsk.

Art Museum

Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art (Russian: Витебский Музей Современного Искусства) was an art museum in Vitebsk organized in 1918 by Marc Chagall, Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Romm. In 1921 it exhibited 120 paintings "representing all the movements of the contemporary art from the Academic Realism to Impressionism to Suprematism". In the mid 1920s the museum was abolished. While some paintings have found their way to museums of Russia and Belarus, the whereabouts of many paintings are unknown.

The Museum was organized in the building of the People's Art School (Народное Художественное Училище) on 10 Bukharin Street. In parallel the same building also hosted another art museum, the so called School Museum for the works of the graduates of the People's Art School. Today 90 paintings of the museum are known (some may belong to the School Museum). The painters included Marc Chagall, Aleksandra Ekster, Robert Falk, Sergei Gerasimov, Natalia Goncharova, Alexander Ivanov, Wassily Kandinsky, Pyotr Konchalovsky, Konstantin Korovin, Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, Kazimir Malevich, Yehuda Pen, Alexander Romm and many others.

The exposition of the museum was open to public in July 1920. In 1922 23 paintings were moved to Petrograd. To the April 1923 only 35 works left. In 1925 there were signals that paintings of avant garde artists from the museum are cut for canvas by the students of Art School. In 1925 the surviving 32 paintings were transferred to Vitebsk Regional Museum. Most of them were transferred to the Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk in 1939. After World War II only one work from the former Vitebsk Museum of Modern Arts was left in Vitebsk: a small still life by David Sternberg. Besides this painting the whereabouts of only 24 are known: 19 paintings are in State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, four paintings are in Belarusian National Arts Museum in Minsk and one painting is in the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art in Japan.