A reader of Myfin.by, Alexander, said that during a trip to Nesvizh Castle, he visited the local souvenir shop and noticed a price tag with an impressive figure.
"I thought I had mistaken the numbers," he said, "I decided that maybe it said 85 rubles, or even 858 rubles. But not eight and a half thousand. This is the first time I've seen such an expensive item in a souvenir shop in Belarus," Alexander wonders.
The price tag indicates that the belt for 8,580 BYN is made in Belarus (manufacturer – "Slutsk Belts"), its dimensions are 325 by 32 centimeters.
By the way, this is not even the most expensive Slutsk belt — on the website of the craft gallery "Slavutasć" there are options for belts costing 10 thousand BYN and 11 thousand BYN.
The thing is, the production of such a belt is expensive in itself. In an STB report, Tatiana Novik, a tour guide at the Museum of the History of Slutsk Belts of the "Slutsk Belts" enterprise, explained that making a classic belt measuring 3.5 meters by 35 centimeters takes 60 hours (which means 1.5 weeks of work with an 8-hour workday on a "five-day week"). The enterprise uses natural silk with added gold or silver, although it also produces variants made of artificial material. A machine is used, which reportedly has no analogues in the world.
Newly-made Slutsk belts are used, for example, as a diplomatic gift — this spring Alexander Lukashenka presented a belt to Kim Jong Un during a visit to North Korea.
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