In Zaslaul, there might have been a stone temple or princely palace in the 12th century, of which historians knew nothing

Reconstruction of Market Square in Zaslaul before "Dazhynki" 2025

Large-scale improvement works in Zaslaul for last year's "Dazhynki" included excavation work in the historical center, where archaeologists conducted their mandatory supervision.

At the International Scientific and Practical Conference on the results of archaeological research in 2025, which began in Nesvizh, researchers Ivan Spirin and Pavel Kenko shared preliminary results of this supervision.

As it turned out, in the northern part of the market square, the cultural layer was preserved literally 20-30 centimeters from the modern ground surface.

It was in the central part of the square that specialists recorded fragments of flat, burnt bricks, visually very similar to plinth. This building material was the main component of monumental architecture during the times of Ancient Rus and Byzantium.

The presence of such fragments allows us to assume that in the 12th century, Zaslaul might have had its own stone temple or princely palace. Until now, Belarusian historical science had neither written nor material evidence of the existence of stone buildings in the city earlier than the end of the 16th century, when a Calvinist church and a bastion castle appeared here.

Павялічыць

Excavation sites and archaeological supervision in Zaslaul during preparations for "Dazhynki" 2025. Photo from social media

The context of the find is supported by other artifacts found in the ancient part of the city. Along with brick fragments, archaeologists collected a collection of weapons and household items: arrowheads, fire-steels, details of horse harnesses. As Sergey Dzyarnovich and Ivan Spirin specify in a separate report, these items constitute an earlier cultural horizon.

Of greatest value is a rare "Carolingian-type" spur, which, by its morphological features, dates back to the 10th-11th centuries. This artifact serves as a clear marker of the "druzhina culture" of early Rus and the Viking Age.

The published photo materials from the conference sparked a discussion in the professional community. Belarusian archaeologist Oleg Trusov, a specialist in the history of monumental architecture, doubted whether the photographs indeed showed fragments of plinth. Architectural archaeologist Ihar Charnyauski noted that visual similarity is not always a guarantee of antiquity.

Павялічыць

Fragments of plinth and other archaeological finds from Zaslaul. Photo from social media

As an example, he cited a story from his own experience when, in the 1980s, during the laying of a water pipeline in Slonim, fragments of thin bricks were also found. Initially, local specialists mistook it for plinth, but detailed study showed that it was material from the second half of the 17th century from a demolished Church of Corpus Christi. In the early Modern Age, as Charnyauski says, craftsmen often used bricks whose proportions could resemble ancient Rus samples.

Zaslaul has an exceptionally rich historical layer from the 17th-18th centuries. At this time, the Dominican monastery, the Przeździecki palace and park ensemble with stone outbuildings and gates were actively built and rebuilt here. Fragments of these later buildings could have ended up in the mixed cultural layer of the market square.

However, judging by the scale ruler included in the presentation slide, the thickness of the presented fragments is only 3 to 3.8 centimeters.

If we rely on the fundamental research by the historian of ancient Rus architecture Pavel Rappoport "Building production of Ancient Rus (10th-13th centuries)," such dimensions fully correspond to the standards of the 11th-12th centuries. Rappoport noted that the thickness of plinth in ancient Rus monuments ranged from 2.5 to 5 centimeters, with the format tending to gradually decrease.

The solution to the question may be the study of the nature of the clay mass and the composition of the building mortar, which had their own specifics in the 10th-13th centuries. Stone buildings of Kievan Rus and the Polotsk Principality were erected using a specific mortar, where the main filler was tsamyanka, finely crushed burnt clay or brick aggregate.

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