Zaosie

ZAOSIE FARM: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ADAM MITSKEVICH

Zaosie Farm, located in Baranovichi district, Brest region, is obligatory for visiting on the tourists’ way, following «Shlyaham Adama Mitskevicha». It was here that the great Belarusian-Polish poet began his life's journey. The farm, where the future poet was born, was destroyed during his lifetime, which was mentioned repeatedly with sadness and a heavy heart in his works.

Scientists still debate about real home of Mitskevich. Novogrudok was considered the only indisputable homeland in the writer's life. However, Zaosie was named the cradle of the Belarusian-Russian poet after his death. In addition to these two versions, there is the third, supported by one of the most important scientists of the Belarusian folklore Adam Kirkorov, who claimed that Adam Mitskevich was from Kosovo farm. However Mitskevich family, participating in writing a biography of the famous poet, unanimously asserted that Zaosie was his original homeland. The obituaries were also published in favor of this version after Mitskevich's death. Zaosie farm was called as the birthplace of the Belarusian-Polish Homer in them.

HISTORICAL REFERENCE

For the first time Zaosie was mentioned in documents in 1775, when the nobleman Joseph Mitskevich, which was the brother of Adam’s grandfather, filed a lawsuit against the gentleman Yanovich in Novogrudok, the owner of the Zaosie farm of that time, to recover the debt of 700 gold. As a result, Zaosie was given to Joseph in payment of debts. And twenty years after, Nikolay Mitskevich, the future father of the great writer, became the land agent for two years. Adam's parents didn’t have their own land, because they were small Lithuanian nobility. Therefore, the version of the birth of Adam in Zaosie is not unfounded. After 1801 the poet's family moved to Novogrudok, because the city had more work.

The Mitskevich family estate in its original form lasted until the First World War, and then it was razed to the ground. There were left only an old lime tree and a pond after it. Information about the internal decoration of the estate has not reached our time, and the original stuff of the XIXth century has not been preserved. Therefore, during the renovation work, the museum founders were based on the descriptions of Mitskevich himself, gleaned from the famous poem "Pan Tadeusz".

There are several dozens of similar estates of the land-poor nobility in the vicinity of Zaosie, but neither of them became so famous as this one. In 1998 the museum building was built in honor of the bicentennial anniversary on the site of the farm, it was designed, according to the drawings of Napoleon Orda and Evgeny Pavlovich, in the same way as the building of that  time. The incumbent Adam Mitskevich Museum in Zaosie is a fine example of traditional Belarusian architecture and it’s a wooden frame, covered with straw with the adjoining porch. The museum atmosphere imbued with the spirit of the era, its interior allows us to touch the greatness of the Belarusian-Polish poet and see how beautiful the area of ​​Belarus  is which brought  him up.