The Salzman Synagogue was built in 1864 at the expense of the merchant Salzman for the poor Jews of Minsk in the suburb of Raków. During the Second World War, it was abandoned and was later rebuilt to house a sports club. Today, the two-storey brick building houses a chess centre.
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.
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 Spirit was built between 1633 and 1642. At the time of its construction, the building belonged to a Catholic monastery in Bernardines. It was only in 1860 that the church was converted to Orthodox worship, and shortly afterwards an Orthodox monastery was inaugurated there in 1870. However, the monastic community was dispersed by the Bolshevik authorities in 1922. The church is now an Orthodox cathedral.
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