Cathedral of the Holy Spirit

The Catholic Church of St. Joseph is a monument of 17th-century Baroque architecture. The church used to be an abbey, but in 1864 the church and monastery were closed and confiscated by the Russian authorities. The church was adapted to the Orthodox church, and the monastery buildings were transformed into barracks of the Kolomna Infantry Regiment and the premises of the Investigation Commission. Since the end of the 19th century, this desecrated church has housed the archives.

St. Mary's Cathedral is the Catholic Cathedral of Minsk. The building was built in 1710 in the Baroque style as a Jesuit church. When the Society of Jesus was dissolved in 1773 by Clement XIV under the pressure of the European monarchies, it was transferred to the diocese. When the Diocese of Minsk was established in 1798, it became the Orthodox Cathedral of the diocese. It was used as a sports hall from 1934 under the USSR regime and was handed over to Catholic worship during the German occupation. After the reconquest of Minsk by the Soviets, the church was redesigned and incorporated into a Stalin-Classicist housing development - the main façade was transformed, the towers demolished and the interiors reused as a sports facility. It was given back to the Roman Catholics after the independence of Belarus in the 1990s, the towers and façade restored in that period (1994-97).

The Cathedral of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul is the oldest church in Minsk still in use. It was built between 1612 and 1630 together with a monastery of the same name. At the beginning of the 18th century, the monastery was almost completely destroyed during the Great Northern War. Empress Catherine II (1762-1796) had the monastery church renovated between 1793 and 1795, but the monastery was then dissolved. In 1812, during the advance of Napoleon's troops against Russia, the Peter and Paul Church was destroyed by French soldiers and served as a field hospital for two months. The church was renovated between 1870 and 1871. The church was closed by the Bolsheviks in 1933 and resumed definitively in 1991.