Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum

The Francis Skaryna Belarusian Library and Museum stands in a quiet corner of north London, a single-storey building surrounded by residential streets. It holds the only collection outside Belarus devoted entirely to Belarusian studies. The library began in 1947 with a few hundred books brought by a Belarusian priest. Over the decades it grew tenfold, then a hundredfold, as donations arrived from communities across Europe and beyond. A separate archive preserves Church records from the 18th and 19th centuries alongside papers of the short-lived Belarusian Democratic Republic. A small museum room displays woven belts from the 18th century and priestly vestments made from them. The library’s shelves contain more than thirty thousand volumes. History, literature and language books dominate, most printed in Belarusian, others in Russian, Polish or German. Among the oldest items are two copies of the Statute of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and sixteenth-century maps. A unique section gathers post-war publications by the Belarusian diaspora from every continent. The music collection holds hundreds of vinyl recordings, mainly folk, rock and classical, with later cassettes and CDs added sporadically. Researchers can also consult nearly two hundred periodicals, some dating back to the 1950s. Visitors step into a single museum room to see gold-and-silk woven belts and a chasuble stitched from them. Coins and temporary banknotes issued in 1918 by local authorities in Słuck, Mahilioŭ and Homieĺ sit beside early Belarusian postage stamps. Paintings by Belarusian artists line the walls of both the library and the nearby Belarusian Catholic Mission. The building still serves as a reference library for scholars and hosts public lectures and book clubs. Quiet corridors hold desks where visitors read rare manuscripts on microfilm or listen to recordings in the original language.