Tuesday, July 2, 2019

BELARUS

I have met two people from Belarus in recent memory, and they were both interesting people. Like a Georgian man with a Russian accent, each were surprised when I could locate their country without instruction, much like in Canada we travel and say we are from Canada, because confusion often arises if we introduce ourselves by province, territory, or worse, city or town. But location aside, I don't know much about Belarusa. Minsk, its capital, is known to me from a longtime possession of a riddle book titled, The Chicken From Minsk.

So this weekend, in meeting a tourist from Belarus I asked her the highlights of her country. I was reminded that it was ruled by a despot, which did not seem surprising given that Alexander Lukashenko has ruled for an impressive 25 years. There are two national languages, Russian and Belarusian. As I expected, the country reached independence soon after the fall of the iron curtain, declaring itself sovereign July 27 1990. What I had not expected though, was the image of wild bison roaming in an ancient forest, but this was what she told me.

Here is an article I found that confirms that Belarus, whose national animal is a bison, still has a forest with wild bison roaming free. In fact, like North American bison, the European bison was hunted to near extinction, but in the 1930s, a few were introduced into a forest preserve from those bred in captivity. After years of seeing and imaging bison roaming the prairies, the forest bison puzzled me so much as to cast doubt in my teller's English vocabulary. Anastasia, you had the correct animal. There are indeed bison in your forests!

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