National Library of Belarus

A glowing diamond-shaped building housing 8.6 million items, lit up at night

The National Library of Belarus is Minsk's most visually striking contemporary building — a giant faceted sphere that looks like a space station or a giant disco ball dropped in a residential neighbourhood east of the city centre. It houses 8.6 million items and is one of the largest libraries in the world by volume.

The building is worth visiting both for its architecture and for the view from its observation deck on the 23rd floor, which offers a panorama of Minsk and the surrounding suburbs. The deck is open daily and costs a few Belarusian rubles to access. In the evening, the exterior panels light up in coordinated colour patterns — one of the stranger and more beautiful urban light shows in Europe.

The library is several kilometres east of the city centre; take the Metro to Uskhod station. Nezavisimosti Ave 116.

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A story
The library's diamond shape — technically a rhombicuboctahedron — was chosen by architects Mikhail Vinogradov and Viktor Kramarenko from a 1989 competition design that sat in a drawer for fifteen years before the Lukashenko government finally built it. The exterior is clad in 4,638 rhombus-shaped glass panels that light up at night in shifting colours, visible from across the city.