Orthodox Cathedral

The Cathedral of the Descent of the Holy Spirit is the main temple of the Belarusian exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Initially, the building, built in the style of the Belarusian Baroque, was the Orthodox monastery of Kosma and Demyan. But in the middle of the XVII century, when the church union began to spread everywhere, the monastery was partially destroyed and a Catholic cathedral was erected in its place, in which the order of Bernardines was located. Only in 1945 the temple was returned to the Orthodox Church.

The main relic is the miraculous icon of the Minsk Mother of God, located to the left of the royal gate in the residence of the Metropolitan of Minsk and Slutsky, Patriarchal Exarch of All Belarus. It is believed that the icon was painted by the evangelist Luke and for a long time it was in Byzantium, and then Prince Vladimir brought it to Kiev. During the Tatar invasion, all jewelry was stolen from the icon, and the face itself was thrown into the waters of the Dnieper. But the icon survived and miraculously appeared in Minsk on one of the banks of Svisloch.

Other relics of the temple are the incorruptible relics of St. Sophia Slutskaya and particles of the relics of the Holy Great Martyr Barbara. In the crypto part of the cathedral there is a baptism church named after Saints Cyril and Methodius.