Babruysk

Babruysk stands on the Berezina, where a castle rose above the river in the fourteenth century. The town's very name is associated with the beavers once found along its waters. It became both a fortified post and a market centre, protected by earthworks, wooden walls and almost a dozen two-storey watchtowers. Merchants and craftsmen gathered where roads met the river.

In the first half of the seventeenth century carpenters, smiths, goldsmiths and bakers worked in a growing town whose market had many stalls. Babruysk passed to Russia in the Second Partition of 1793. In 1810 the Russian authorities began a new fortress; nearly complete by 1812, it resisted Napoleon's forces for months. Work resumed after the war, and the fortress was completed in 1820.