Kashtanovka

Kashtanovka village

Kashtanovka villlage is situated in Prujan area of Brest region. It doesn’t seem to be marked out among other villages and its councils, though this settlement has a long, interesting and original history. Although cold statistics doesn’t consider the village to be outstanding, real history approve that the settlement is worth attention.

The rebelling owner and next Kashtanovka owners

Chahets is the original village name. It was first mentioned in 1563 in documentary sources because it belonged to local forestry in those times. Later Chahets changed its owners. This place is historically concerned with the names of Mejeevsky, Krupinsky, Bulgarin. It was county judge Mihail Bulgarin who bought the village and created a patrimony with a living house and a library. He also added some adventures to its history: Though he belonged to a very famous Belorussian family, he took part in a gentry’s rebellion, supported rebels, guarded them in his own estate, organized there treatment for the injured and after that he lived there during his banishment for rebelling.

Then the village passed to Diankonsky family as dowry of the beauty Maria from Kernozitsky family. Albin Diakonsky breathed a new life into the patrimony, changed it, and planted a garden according to all rules of gardening art. Good house holding buildings, landscape compositions, nice details such as small architectural forms (for example a stone looking like an armchair stood under an old ash-tree on the road side) are just some outstanding features of Belorussian landowners’ modest life. The driveway led to the entrance of the master’s house that was marked with 4 columns and paved with monogram pile.

Broken nest, uneasy time

The management was solid, documents say about a big amount of peasants and capitalism influenced a lot too at that time. Farming output was processed there. In short the estate became powerful in the second part of the nineteenth century, existed and was gone with the epoch given birth to it. The revolution, two world wars – such turning events destroyed a lot of families and patrimonies. Diakonsky estate is not an exception.

The owners faced up with repressions (last Diakonsky was arrested and died in an unknown place; some historians consider it was in Siberya, his wife and child went abroad). The estate wasn’t relevant in modern history.

Nowadays

Most of the buildings were destroyed by time. We can see only ruins today. Well-groomed park became a forest zone. Only the stone-armchair is still on its place waiting for something. And history keeps repeating that such heritage needs learning, restoring and using foe cultural goals.

Similar patrimonies, even in such decayed state, save spirit of past. All that was created here was relevant and now it exhibits materials of historical culture. Only in such places you can hear sounds that can’t be heard in our everyday routine.