Rakaŭ

Rakaŭ stands on the Islach River west of Minsk, in the lands of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The settlement appears in fifteenth-century chronicles, and a castle was built on an older fortified site. In 1465 Casimir Jagiellon gave Rakaŭ to the Lithuanian chancellor Mykolas Kęsgaila; it later passed through the Zawisza and Sanguszko families.

The Sanguszkos endowed two religious houses here: Konstancja Teodora founded a Dominican monastery in 1686, and Kazimierz founded a Basilian Uniate monastery in 1702. Rakaŭ came under Russian rule in the second partition of the Commonwealth in 1793. Catherine II confiscated it from the Sanguszkos the following year and granted it to General Saltykov, who sold it to Wawrzyniec Zdziechowski in 1804. The two monasteries were closed by the Russian authorities in the 1830s.