«Europe» Hotel

A five-star hotel with its 200-year history is located in Internatsionalnaya Street in the centre of the capital of the Republic of Belarus. The seven-storey hotel offers respectable spacious rooms and excellent service-the staff speak foreign languages, there are saunas and a  pool, a conference hall, a sumptuous restaurant with exquisite cuisine, four bars, a library and a variety of other services corresponding to the modern requirements for hotels of the same level. Glass elevators with a panoramic view make it possible to look around smart and thoughtful interior of the room. The hotel is part of the international hotel chain Warwick International Hotels.

The building of the hotel was erected at the beginning of the 19thcentury.  According to one version Veniamin Polyak born in the richest merchant dynasty of Minsk played the lead role as initiator and sponsor of the building. Another version holds that originally the building was a two-storey wooden construction and belonged to Pyotr Yupinsky who sold his property to the Polyak family. Then around the middle of the 19th century Veniamin Polyak attached a three-storey building to the construction and opened up the «Hotel of Polyak». Travellers, actors and musicians used to stay here. But after the fire of 1884 destroyed the hotel to the foundation the building had to be restored and one more floor was built on so it was a three-storey building then. When the reconstruction works were finished the hotel started a new cycle in its history and got the name «Europe».

Though the 20th century turned out to be not all positive everything had begun quite optimistic. The beginning of the century became the best time for the hotel. In 1906-1909 the hotel was rebuilt again. Then it was a six-storey construction with balconies and stucco work in the modernist style. Plenty of decorative elements on its façade, luxurious suites with all the facilities, a sumptuous Saulievich`s restaurant, the biggest bookshop in Minsk, hairdressing saloons and the only existing lift in Minsk made the hotel the best in the city. The students secretly found their way into the hotel`s building and took the elevator until they got caught up in the process by the porter. The building was the biggest in the city at that time and owned by Yakov and Grigoriy Poliak-the members of the same family. With the coming of the Soviets the hotel changed to the worse. The sumptuous restaurant with the orchestra was placed in the canteen, many of the spacious rooms housed some institutions, and all the building became ratty and buggy. Then the Second World War broke and in its early years the hotel was hit by a bomb totally destroying the beautiful building. The place where the hotel  had been placed before was staying vacant for a really long time. In the 1950s the trees were planted here. And only in 2004 the authorities of Minsk decided to rebuild the pre-revolutionary building to construct it as close as possible to the peculiarities of the past times. The President of the Republic of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko uttered the main criterion of the reconstruction: the new built hotel must be a five-star one and this condition was observed as we know. The building was erected and preserved its best past features however the hotel appeared to be built of seven storeys. In 2007 the «Europe» hotel opened its hospitable doors. Now everyone can visit this historical place.