St. Mary's Cathedral

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.

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.

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.