Heritage

         Belarus has very rich and interesting history. And Byelorussians well know the past and carefully concern to everything, that remains to them in the inheritance from ancestors. About the attitude of Byelorussians to the past, to native ground Yanka Kupala has well written in the poem – “Heritage»:

From forebears' ages, long since gone,
A heritage has come to me,
Among strange folk, among my own,
Me it caresses, motherly.
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And through black night and through white day
I keep, my watch unceasingly,
Lest this my treasure goes astray,
Lest by drones it should eaten be.

I bear it in my living soul
Like torch-flame ever bright for me,
That through deaf darkness to my goal,
Midst vandals it may lighten me.

With it lives my thought-family.
Bringing dreams of sincerity . . .
And its name, all-in-all must be
My native land, my heritage.

Yanka Kupala (July 7, 1882 - June 28, 1942) (pen name of Ivan Dominikovich Lucevich)