Hrodna

Hrodna is much the most Polish and Lithuanian feeling city in the country, a place of baroque churches and a royal castle on a bluff above the Nioman that was a seat of the old commonwealth before the partitions took it. Two castles stand side by side on the same hill, one medieval and rebuilt, one an eighteenth century palace. The cathedral holds a carved wooden altar three storeys high. A twelfth century church of patterned brick survives above the river. The canal north of the town has working locks dating from the Tsarist period.