A memorial place dedicated to the beginning of the service of pastor Lukaš Dziekuć-Maliej in Brest, the first translator of the Bible into the modern Belarusian language.

In the early 1920s it was a city hotel, which was located at the corner of Mickievič and Dambroŭski streets (now Mickievič and Savieckaja). In the basement of this building some of the first public church services were conducted by pastor Lukaš Dziekuć-Maliej in Brest in 1922. A rented room could hold up to 100 people at a time, but the church grew quickly, and in 1926 they started building their own house of worship in Šyrokaja Street (near the current intersection of Puškinskaja street and Kasmanaŭtaŭ avenue).

Lukaš Dziekuć-Maliej was one of the most reputed pastors of the Great evangelical awakening in Belarus. He was born on October 1, 1888 in Slonim, but he spent the most prolific years of his life in Brest. He arrived in the City-on-the-river Buh in 1921, after the Polish authorities banned him from living in Hrodna, where the pastor started a lot of Belarusian schools. In Brest, L. Dziekuć-Maliej started working on the construction of a Baptist church, which in the 1930s became one of the largest of the kind in Europe, and also began work on the translation of the Bible into the modern Belarusian language. A translation of the New Testament and Psalms was published in 1931, with a circulation of 25,000 copies, which was unusually large for the time. Lukaš Dziekuć-Maliej received help with the translation from his wife Sierafima, and one of the leaders of the Belarusian national movement, Anton Luckievič.

After World War II, Lukaš Dziekuć-Maliej was forced to go to Poland, where he continued his service of God and people. He died in Gdansk in 1955, and was buried there. In 2006 the Gdansk City Hall named one of the streets of the city after Lukaš Dziekuć-Maliej.

Publication date: 15.07.2019.

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