Kalozha Church (Sts. Boris and Gleb)

The Kalozha Church is the oldest building in Hrodna and one of the oldest in Belarus, dating from around 1160 when the city was a centre of the Black Ruthenian principality. It is a rare surviving example of polychrome Ruthenic architecture: the exterior is decorated with coloured ceramic tiles and crosses embedded in the brick, giving it a patterned, almost textile-like surface unlike anything else in the country.

The church sits at the bottom of the bluff below the Old Castle, close to the river, and the setting is as atmospheric as the building itself. The interior is plain by comparison with the baroque churches in the centre of town, but the original 12th-century stonework is well preserved. The wooden wall on the south side — a replacement for the section that fell into the river in the 1870s — is visible from outside.

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A story
In the 1870s, the southern wall of the church slid into the Nioman river, taking with it roughly half of the original 12th-century structure. Rather than rebuild in stone, the Tsarist authorities replaced the missing wall with wood — creating the unusual sight of an ancient Byzantine stone church with a plain wooden wall on one side. The wood-and-stone combination is still what you see today, an accidental monument to a 19th-century disaster.