A Place I Once Knew

Reliving childhood memories in Braslav, Belarus

My friend Yuri doing a salutation to the sun, as he calls it. Every time we’d swim or dive in this lake, he’s have this ritual. I’m connecting to the higher powers, he’d tell me. I laughed, but thought it was great. A true love for nature and a belief that there’s something superior to us.

Every story has a beginning. Mine began in Belarus.

Well—technically, it was the USSR back then, a country that no longer exists. But Belarus is the land where I was born and spent my first ten years, until my parents left for Australia.

Lake “Rozhevo/Рожево” just a few hundred meters from Yuri’s house. The place where I swam, dove and caught crayfish more times than I can remember.

I’ve never been one for nostalgia, never felt that sentimental pull toward my birthplace the way some do. I was grateful we left, especially when we did—right after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Those were hard years. Long queues for anything, crime spiraling out of control, winters that seemed even grayer under the weight of uncertainty.

But one place in that country stirs something in me, a flicker of warmth.

Some of my earliest memories are from here. They’re faint—images, smells, brief moments. The Braslav Lake region, tucked away in the north of Belarus.

I was a child on holiday. I remember the rural shops, the bus stops, the lakes. I remember my father and I fishing, again and again, until we finally caught one tiny fish. He still reminds me of our failure as fishermen.

Years passed. Life took its turns. I never had much attachment to my so-called motherland, but somehow, I married a girl from Belarus. Together, we kept coming back. First once, then again, then almost every year. My wife would visit her parents. I needed something to do.

And so, by another twist of fate, I found myself back in Braslav. Looking for things to photograph.

As an adult, I saw it with new eyes. And then, the smells, the sounds—they unlocked something. Memory is strange that way. I kept returning, summer after summer, until 2018.

Then we went to South America. Then COVID happened. Then political turmoil.

And suddenly, everything changed.

My wife lost both of her parents during those Covid times. My grandmother passed away. Some of my best friends left Belarus. Some of my family did too. The country began to feel distant in a way it never had before. My reasons for going back unraveled.

What I have now are photographs…

Many of the photos I have made in Braslav are tied to one man—Yuri (above). He reintroduced me to region, welcomed me into his home, a place I stayed for weeks at a time nearly every summer for a decade. We did a lot together.

We fished. We sat in the Russian banya, sweating it out for hours, talking about life, about travel. Yuri even joined me for a couple of days in Barcelona when I was traveling around Spain.

One summer, I bought a car—an UAZ Buhanka, nicknamed the "loaf of bread"—to navigate the backroads of Braslav.

Maybe I’ll share more photos from that time.

My wife’s nephew Maxim in the famous UAZ Buhanka.

For now, this is an introduction. Visual notes of a place lodged in memory, a region that stirs something close to nostalgia. Not for Belarus as a whole, but for personal memories and the Braslav I knew. A place that gave me something rare and good.

4:30 in the morning sunrise over Yuri’s house, where I spent so many summer days.

I think of those sunrises at 4:30 in the morning, the fog rolling in come autumn.

The crayfish we used to catch by the bucket—until the nearby collective farm started dumping something into the lake, turning the water murky, making it impossible to see what lay beneath.

So much has changed…

I look at these photos now and realize they captured something unrepeatable.

The children have grown. Yuri no longer lives in the house where I spent so many summers. I’m pretty sure that the grandmother in the photo above isn't alive any more.

And so, the photos take on a different weight. They are not history in any grand sense. But they are a record—of a period in my life, and of a place I may never return to.

It was unlikely, this chapter. But for a time, it was mine. And it was good.