How a Belarusian Bar in Poznań Became a Community Hub

An artist from Brest got tired of working in three jobs and left Belarus. She settled in Poland and created a cultural foundation that has grown into a center of Belarusian culture.

“Your space is the embassy of culture of Belarus.”

“My home was in a typical apartment block on Arlouskaya Street in Brest. It represents Belarus for me, even if the building looks the same as in Poland or Germany and doesn’t have anything typically Belarusian in its appearance”, says the artist and cultural manager Volha Stryzhniova. “I would still dedicate poems to it because it is my home, where my mother lives and bakes the best pancakes”.

In Brest, she got by with three jobs at once: journalism, leading a children’s club, and teaching runway-walking at a modeling school. In 2019, she left it all and moved to Poznań in Poland. “I think the lack of money and self-realization made me tired. Emotionally, I felt drained, and someone told me that it could be easier to live abroad... Or maybe I just had to move to another city”, she says.

Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, she and a friend rented premises and, in August 2020, they opened the My (“us” in English) Bar. Being the only staff, they handled everything, from serving customers to organizing workshops.

“Before 2020, we didn’t plan to transform it into a space for foreigners, but we realized it was needed”, Stryzhniova explains. “People arriving from Belarus looked frightened by the new city. They were discussing at the bar where they lived, what common friends they have”.

Then, in the early days of the 2020 uprising in her native country, the My Bar duo organized a photo exhibition about the protests and added national dishes to the menu.

Around the same time, Stryzhniova noticed that she was burned out after two years of working at the bar. So, she left it to create a new cultural foundation named Kut (homeland). “Now the Polish say it’s up to us when it comes to Belarusian culture”, she says. “To be exact, the owner of our premises thinks so. He is a Polish anarchist who opened all the famous squats in Poznań and visited Belarus several times. He said ‘Why didn’t you put up a sign that your space is the embassy of culture of Belarus?”