250km long, the river of Yaselda - one of the left-bank tributaries of the Pripyat – is one of the most beautiful rivers of Polesie. Its name is of Indo-European origin and can be translated as “the river of gods”. The Yaselda marks the border of the northern part of Polesie, known as Zagorodie. People have inhabited its banks since times immemorial, and they still live here. The adjacent villages have preserved the unique Polesie layout with houses placed along the riverbanks in a line, front-faces towards the river, and with isolated household outbuildings. The people still practice local folk arts and crafts – in particular, the traditional Polesie embroideries and weaving. Folk arts museums are not infrequent in villages; in some of them visitors are encouraged to learn through various kinds of activities: straw weaving, woodcarving, weaving and embroidering. Folk traditions and fests are well-preserved: among the most popular are the traditional Christmas (Koliady) and mid-summer (Kupala) celebrations, the Calling of the Spring, harvesting holidays, Yuria (May 6) – the day when the cattle is for the first time driven back to pastures after the wintering period. The locals – poleshuks – carefully preserve the ancient folk traditions.
Kokoritsa – a truly Polesian village resting on several islands among the endless bogs – is not an easily accessible place even by Polesie standards. The predominant means of transportation here is the boat, while individual islands are linked with the help of wooden clapper bridges (“Polesie boardwalks”), whose total length may reach several kilometres. Several special poles (called “tychka” by locals) are placed at the beginning and end of each bridge for the people to support themselves with while walking. The art of walking these bridges is taught to local children at a very early age, as it can a difficult and fairly dangerous task, especially in autumn and winter when the boards become very slippery. Only two family names are used by the villagers – Zenkevitch and Protasevitch. Also, there are two cemeteries. People are buried in family graves; if a woman changed her name in marriage, she is nevertheless buried with her original relatives.
The village of Bezdezh. A lot of Polesie traditions are linked to folk costume. For example, apron has always been an obligatory part of women’s costume. It was considered a shame to leave the house without an apron. Holiday aprons were made of bleached linen, decorated with embroideries and hand-made lace. Bezdezh aprons is not only the name of a local museum, but also a well-known brand. Apart from aprons, the villagers make towels, bed linen, blankets and tablecloths, all in keeping with the centuries-old traditions. Here every house looks like a museum, the only difference being that all the “exhibits” are in fact ordinary, everyday things used by Polesie people.
Motol. Further downstream lies the village of Motol – a place that has been inhabited for several millennia. Here archeologists were able to find traces of primitive people that came to this area following the end of the last ice age (10-14 thousand years ago). One of the primitive men sites from the neolithic age was discovered mere 2 kilometers away from Motol at a sandy hill by the Yaselda river, where over 700 flint tools were unearthed, including cutters, scrapers, piercing needles, arrow heads, axes, fragments of pottery, knives, sickles, etc. Officially, however, the settlement’s history begins in 1442 when it was first mentioned in a written document – the Lithuanian Metrika.
Motol is famous for skilled embroiderers and weavers. The craft is taught from early childhood – girls 10 to 12 years of age participate in the work together with the adults. This falls well in line with the local customs: at this age girls already start preparing their wedding gifts – linen, traditional towels, covers and beautifully embroidered clothes. Every bride wants to amaze the groom, his relatives and the rest of the home-folk with her skills.
Both local folk costume (called “stroi”) and traditional ritual towels (known as “rushnik”) served as a kind of IDs: using them it was possible to tell the approximate region and sometimes event the exact village a person comes from. The Motol rushniks – of which there are plenty in the local museum – use two primary colours: black and red. The decorative patterns of any Belarusian rushnik contain encrypted information about the people’s idea of the surrounding world and the universe (the symbols of the sun, the moon and the stars). They also bear the symbols of nature – animals, birds, insects and plants.
One of the most famous old Motol folk crafts that have survived till today is making traditional women’s winter jackets. They have enjoyed popularity both in Belarus and abroad. Since 1930s the jackets are made of red basil.
Today Motol is a big village with the population of 3 thousand people. In 1533 the Queen of Rzecz Pospolita Bona Sforza granted Magdeburg right to Motol (the right for self-government) and it quickly turned into a major centre of trade and crafts. The Queen also brought several Italians to Motol to serve in her local residence. The Italians soon assimilated with the local population, and all that’s now left of them are several unusual for Polesie names, such as Palto, Kulbeda, Kuzur and Bazan.
Bona Sforza herself left a very noticeable trace in the Belarusian history. In 1518 the duke of the Great Duchy of Lithuania and Polish king Sigizmund II the Old married a young Italian, daughter of the duke of Milan – Bona Sforza. She was given excellent education and knew many sciences; as a child she met Leonardo da Vinci who worked in her father’s palace at the time. Bona was not only beautiful, but had a rare political talent. She carried out a number of progressive economic reforms in Belarus, helped to strengthen the military potential of the Great Duchy of Lithuania. Interestingly enough, the present-day coat-of-arms of the Polesie town of Pruzhany is in fact very similar to the coat-of-arms of Milan: an adder on the silver field with a child emerging out of its jaws. It is known that the coat-of-arms was granted to Pruzhany by king Sigizmund II August.
Molodovo and Porechie, both situated on the banks of the Yaselda river, are sometimes referred to as “the cradle of Belarusian capitalism”. Both towns are linked closely to the Skirmunt family. For Polesie the name Skirmunt means the same as Stroganov and Morozov for Russia – or Ford and Rockefeller for the USA. The Skirmunts go back a very long time – their family line can be traced down to the legendary early medieval Lithuanian dukes. The duke of Pinsk Vasili Skirmunt is mentioned in documents from mid-14th century. His descendants were faithful servants of their motherland, occupied important official positions but remained rather obscure from historical point of view till the beginning of the 19th century.
In 1798 in Molodovo a child was born into the family of Semion Skirmunt. The boy was named Aleksandr. He received excellent education at Vilno University and then went on to study in France and Germany, his interests lying primarily in the sphere of practical chemistry. Upon returning home he married the daughter of Minsk governor. While still alive, his father entrusted both the estate and the family capital to him. In 1830 Aleksandr started a sugar mill in Molodovo. This was the first enterprises of the kind in Belarus. The factory produced high-grade refined sugar. Aleksandr obtained a patent for a device for quick vaporization of sugar syrup. Simultaneously, a wool factory was set up in the neighbouring Skirmunt estate of Porechie. This was the biggest wool factory in Belarus at the time. Aleksandr Skirmunt developed a proprietary technology, brought the most advanced equipment available and invited German foremen to teach the local population. Beginning with the 1860s the make of the Porechie factory received prizes and diplomas at the most prestigious European industrial exhibitions. Apart from that, a steam-driven mill and a cheese factory were founded in Porechie. Alekasandr Skirmunt was first in Belarus to offer social security options to his workers, maintained a medical office and a hospital, provided education to the workers’ children and even sent the most talented of them to study abroad.
Once it was a magnificently white palace of the Skirmunts with 8 porches that dominated Molodovo. The only thing still remaining today is the round-shaped chapel and the famous old Molodovo bell that is now placed in the local church. In June 1997 a strong hurricane struck the Brest region of Belarus, tearing down the Molodovo bell-tower. The bell dating back to 1583 fell and hit the ground – but remained intact. This was a narrow escape, for the bell was not only a valuable piece of church property, but also an important historical document. Its middle section bears an inscription – 4 columns of text, 13 lines each. They are written in Old Belarusian with Latin letters that were hardly ever used for writing in Belarusian at that time. The text tells us about an old Belarusian family - Voino (owners of Molodovo before the Skirmunts), about certain events of the time – and in particular about the pressure put by the Union Church on Christian Orthodox denomination. The bell was presented to the local church to be kept there forever. For centuries the local population treasured it as a holy relic. During the WW II it was dismantled and buried deep underground to save it from the Nazi troops. By now the tower has been rebuild, and the bell is back in place.
Only the works building and the old park remained in the Porechie estate. On the whole, the Porechie Skirmunt manor, of which the park was a significant part, formed at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries on the right banks of the Yaselda river. The layout was in many ways determined by the economic and industrial needs – the production facilities and buildings were placed near the river.
The Porechie park (60 ha) is a natural botanical landmark of national importance. The park itself and the immediately adjacent territory is one of the best-preserved natural landscapes in the Yaselda floodplain. This relatively small area holds a great diversity of landscape features and ecosystems in their natural state: the riverbed, the bank tree communities, flood meadows, the bog, forests; pre-terrace and terrace forests; terrace-dividing forest. The landscaped park is a monument of old Belarusian park architecture. It was founded at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries at the right flat-lying bank of the Yaselda. At the centre of the park lies a lawn with two boulders, from which the paths diverge in various directions. The original path pattern has been preserved almost intact, as well as the architectural and artistic elements: a stone bench, pavilions and decorated flowerbeds. 6 information boards have been installed. Today the trees that dominate the park are oaks; at the same time, it has been enriched with many exotic plants: canoewood, butternut, wingnut, cypress, balsam fir, Alpine stone pine and quercitron. Especially interesting is the only one in Belarus common golden spruce.
Some of the exotic plants are provided with information boards. The landscaped portion of the park was founded by Roman Skirmunt at the beginning of the 20th century and was based on a natural forest. The latter underwent minimal changes to form the basis of a landscape park. At its edge stands a round-shaped chapel that holds the body of Roman Skirmunt. The park features one of the oldest and most interesting in Brest region ecological study routes for school children. Numerous excursions are regularly held here by the teacher from Porechie secondary school and by the staff of the Porechie forestry.
In the village of Porechie, which lies directly on the Yaselda bank at the node of numerous water tourist routes, there is a literary museum dedicated to Yevgenia Yanishchits – a famous Belarusian poet of the 20th century’s second half. Just outside the village one can find an open-air ethnographic museum depicting a traditional house of a Palesie inhabitant. Among other sites of interest are the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin and a military cemetery.
Further downstream lie places connected with the Tvardovski family – the villages of Velsnitsa, Merchitsy and Tvardovka. This family gave us a famous 19th century scientist, a philosopher, head of the Vilno University and a famous poet of the Soviet period Aleksandr Tvardovski.
Where the Yaselda finally joins the Pripyat, you’ll see one of the biggest colonies of white stork. Here begin many of the Palesie ecological routes, which include the adjacent villages of Kudrichi, Kuradovo and Polshchevo.
Kudrichi. In the lower reaches of Yaselda, not far from the town of Pinsk, lies the Palesie village of Kudrichi – a natural open-air museum of traditional local culture. Here the time itself seems to stand still, and the influence of the modern civilization was kept to absolute minimum. Here you can see the way most of the Palesie population lived some 100-200 years ago. The reed-covered rooftops all along the main street, traditional house layout, cattle barns with three doors (for horses, cows, sheep and pigs), “klunia” – a building for storing the unthrashed wheat, hay and straw; “tok” (or “tyk”) – the tool for trashing the sheaves. An obligatory outbuilding for any Polesie village – with groundwater so close to the surface – was the so-called “stopka” (or “vystsepka”) to store potato, vegetables, fruit and winter food supply in. Stacks of hay and firewood stored in a traditional way are very common, too. In Kudrichi you can also see huge old pine logs – “borti” – once used for keeping the bees in.
Starting as far back as the pre-Christian era the Pripyat plain and the adjacent territories were the centre of agriculture, crafts and spiritual life of the whole of Polesie region. Belarus’ largest area with fertile and calcareous soils (about 45000 ha) lies here. High humidity and favourable temperatures helped form a uniquely biologically diverse environment. It was here that men discovered agriculture. Thanks to favourable climatic conditions, numerous settlements appeared along the edges of the plain. At present close-to-natural landscapes are mainly found within the Pripyat floodplain. They also have certain historic and cultural value, which stems from the numerous well-preserved archaeological sites. Also, traditional forms of agricultural and economic activities and folklore have been preserved here in much greater degree than anywhere else in the country.
Until now the Pripyat floodplain is of crucial importance to the local population. They live from fishing, use the locally available wood as fuel and building material; flood meadows provide their cattle with excellent pasture and serve as a source of hay. Wild-hive beekeeping is still quite common.
Kokoritsa – a truly Polesian village resting on several islands among the endless bogs – is not an easily accessible place even by Polesie standards. The predominant means of transportation here is the boat, while individual islands are linked with the help of wooden clapper bridges (“Polesie boardwalks”), whose total length may reach several kilometres. Several special poles (called “tychka” by locals) are placed at the beginning and end of each bridge for the people to support themselves with while walking. The art of walking these bridges is taught to local children at a very early age, as it can a difficult and fairly dangerous task, especially in autumn and winter when the boards become very slippery. Only two family names are used by the villagers – Zenkevitch and Protasevitch. Also, there are two cemeteries. People are buried in family graves; if a woman changed her name in marriage, she is nevertheless buried with her original relatives.
Both local folk costume (called “stroi”) and traditional ritual towels (known as “rushnik”) served as a kind of IDs: using them it was possible to tell the approximate region and sometimes event the exact village a person comes from. The Motol rushniks – of which there are plenty in the local museum – use two primary colours: black and red. The decorative patterns of any Belarusian rushnik contain encrypted information about the people’s idea of the surrounding world and the universe (the symbols of the sun, the moon and the stars). They also bear the symbols of nature – animals, birds, insects and plants. 
Molodovo and Porechie, both situated on the banks of the Yaselda river, are sometimes referred to as “the cradle of Belarusian capitalism”. Both towns are linked closely to the Skirmunt family. For Polesie the name Skirmunt means the same as Stroganov and Morozov for Russia – or Ford and Rockefeller for the USA. The Skirmunts go back a very long time – their family line can be traced down to the legendary early medieval Lithuanian dukes. The duke of Pinsk Vasili Skirmunt is mentioned in documents from mid-14th century. His descendants were faithful servants of their motherland, occupied important official positions but remained rather obscure from historical point of view till the beginning of the 19th century. 
Only the works building and the old park remained in the Porechie estate. On the whole, the Porechie Skirmunt manor, of which the park was a significant part, formed at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th centuries on the right banks of the Yaselda river. The layout was in many ways determined by the economic and industrial needs – the production facilities and buildings were placed near the river. 
In the village of Porechie, which lies directly on the Yaselda bank at the node of numerous water tourist routes, there is a literary museum dedicated to Yevgenia Yanishchits – a famous Belarusian poet of the 20th century’s second half. Just outside the village one can find an open-air ethnographic museum depicting a traditional house of a Palesie inhabitant. Among other sites of interest are the Church of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin and a military cemetery.