Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an area of 207,600 square kilometres (80,200 sq mi) with a population of 9.1 million. The country has a hemiboreal climate and is administratively divided into six regions. Minsk is the capital and largest city; it is administered separately as a city with special status.
Belarusian is an East Slavic language. It is one of the two official languages in Belarus, alongside Russian. Additionally, it is spoken in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine by Belarusian minorities in those countries.
The State Anthem of the Republic of Belarus, better known as "We Belarusians", is the national anthem of Belarus. It was originally written in the 1940s and adopted in 1955 for use in the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. The music of the Belarusian SSR anthem was composed by Niescier Sakałowski and the lyrics were written by Michas Klimkovič. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the music composed by Sakalowski was kept and the lyrics were discarded. New lyrics, which were written by Klimkovič and Uładzimir Karyzna, were adopted by a presidential decree issued on 2 July 2002.
Freddy Krueger is a fictional character and the antagonist of the A Nightmare on Elm Street horror film franchise. Created by Wes Craven, he made his debut in Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) as the malevolent spirit of a child killer who had been burned to death by his victims' parents after evading prison. Krueger goes on to murder his victims in their dreams, causing their deaths in the real world as well. In the dream world, he is a powerful force and seemingly invulnerable. However, whenever Freddy is pulled back into the real world, he has normal human vulnerabilities and can be destroyed. He is commonly identified by his burned, disfigured face, dirty red-and-green-striped sweater and brown fedora, and trademark metal-clawed, brown leather, right hand glove. This glove was the product of Krueger's own imagination, having welded the blades himself before using it to murder many of his victims, both in the real and dream worlds. Over the course of the film series, Freddy has battled several reoccurring survivors including Nancy Thompson and Alice Johnson. The character was consistently portrayed by Robert Englund in the original film series as well as in the television spin-off Freddy's Nightmares. The reboot portrays him as an undead groundskeeper accused of molesting the students.
Trasianka is an informal term for mixed form of speech in which Belarusian and Russian elements and structures are combined arbitrarily. Due to the negative connotation of the word “trasianka” it has been suggested that in the linguistic debate the term "Belarusian-Russian mixed speech" should be used.
The Belarus national football team represents Belarus in men's international football, and is controlled by the Football Federation of Belarus, the governing body for football in Belarus. Belarus' home ground is Dinamo Stadium in Minsk. Since independence in 1991, Belarus has not yet qualified for a FIFA World Cup or UEFA European Championship.
A raion is a type of administrative unit of several post-Soviet states. The term is used for both a type of subnational entity and a division of a city. The word is from the French rayon, and is commonly translated as 'district' in English.
Konstanty Kalinowski, or Wincenty Konstanty Kalinowski, was a Polish writer,journalist, lawyer and revolutionary. He was one of the leaders of 1863 January Uprising on the lands of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He is considered as a national hero in present-day Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. Particularly in Belarus, Kalinowski is revered as Father of the Nation and icon of Belarusian nationalism.
Ludwik Władysław Franciszek Kondratowicz, better known as Władysław Syrokomla, was a Polish romantic poet, writer and translator working in Vilnius and Vilna Governorate, then Russian Empire, whose writings were mainly dedicated to the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In his writings, Syrokomla called himself a Lithuanian but was disappointed by his inability to speak the Lithuanian language.
The Republican Party of Labour and Justice is a political party in Belarus founded by Ivan Antonovich in 1993. The chairman is Vasil Zadnyaprany. The party is considered to be supportive of the government of president Alexander Lukashenko.
Belarusfilm is the main film studio of Belarus.
Western Belorussia or Western Belarus is a historical region of modern-day Belarus which belonged to the Second Polish Republic during the interwar period. For twenty years before the 1939 invasion of Poland, it was the northern part of the Polish Kresy macroregion. Following the end of World War II in Europe, most of Western Belorussia was ceded to the Soviet Union by the Allies, while some of it, including Białystok, was given to the Polish People's Republic. Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western Belorussia formed the western part of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR). Today, it constitutes the west of modern Belarus.
Come and See is a 1985 Soviet anti-war film directed by Elem Klimov and starring Aleksei Kravchenko and Olga Mironova. Its screenplay, written by Klimov and Ales Adamovich, is based on the 1971 novel Khatyn and the 1977 collection of survivor testimonies I Am from the Fiery Village, of which Adamovich was a co-author. Klimov had to fight eight years of censorship from the Soviet authorities before he was allowed to produce the film in its entirety.
Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script was an official standard of romanization of Belarusian geographical names.
The Polish minority in Belarus numbers officially 288,000 according to 2019 census. However, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland the number is as high as 1,100,000. It forms the second largest ethnic minority in the country after the Russians, at around 3.1% of the total population according to the official census. According to the official census, an estimated 205,200 Belarusian Poles live in large agglomerations and 82,493 in smaller settlements, with the number of women exceeding the number of men by 33,905. Some estimates by Polish non-governmental sources in the U.S. are higher, citing the previous poll held in 1989 under the Soviet authorities with 413,000 Poles recorded and the census of 1959 with 538,881 Poles recorded in Belarus.
From Hell to Hell is a 1997 Belarusian drama film about the Kielce pogrom directed by Dmitry Astrakhan. The film was selected as the Belarusian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 69th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
Belarusian Gothic, also known as Ruthenian Gothic, is the architectural style of ecclesiastical buildings and fortified structures of the 15th and 16th centuries in modern Belarus, Lithuania, eastern Poland and western Ukraine.
The Cinema of Belarus began on 17 December 1924 with the creation by decree of what later became Belarusfilm studio. The studio was moved to Minsk in 1939. Film production was interrupted by World War II, and restarted in 1946, when the studio assumed its current name.
"And now I will show you, where they were preparing the attack on Belarus from" is a phrase widely spread on Runet said by Alexander Lukashenko, which attempts to justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine in regards to Belarus. The phrase subsequently became very popular in many countries of the former Soviet Union and started being used as a meme in various videos from mid-March 2022.