On 21 March, the employees of the bibliology research department of the National Library of Belarus visited the Minsk Theological Academy.
The guests got acquainted with an exhibition prepared by the library of the Minsk Theological Academy, and also visited the church-historical museum of the Belarusian Orthodox Church and the biblical cabinet at the department of biblical studies and theology. The unique facsimile edition The Book Heritage of Francysk Skaryna, donated by the Patriarchal Exarch to the academic library, was among the exhibits.
Rector Archimandrite Sergiy (Akimov) conducted a tour of the academic buildings and told the guests about the organization of the educational process and the scientific and publishing activities of the departments. In the biblical cabinet, visitors learned how the canon of the Slavonic-Russian Bible was formed and how its first hand-written and printed publications appeared.
The representatives of the National Library of Belarus got acquainted with the exhibition of manuscripts and facsimile editions of the 11th–17th centuries, which was organized in the reading room of the academic library on the occasion of the Day of the Orthodox Book. The head of the library, Ilya Perchenko, told the guests about the formation of the library’s collection and the organization of work in the library now.
The library of the Minsk Theological Academy has about 60 thousand items of storage. The initial fund of the library was formed of the books donated to the Minsk Theological Academy by Metropolitan Filaret (Vakhromeev) (now the Honorary Patriarchal Exarch of All Belarus), and also due to the transferring of the full library collection of the Minsk Diocesan Administration to the academic library. The repositories contain books of the 17th–19th centuries. The fund includes scientific and popular scientific publications on various disciplines and religion, periodicals, encyclopedic and educational literature, theological studies, writings of holy fathers, fiction, editions in ancient and modern foreign languages.
