Ivenets. Church of St. Alexei.

The Church of St. Alexis in Ivenets is built of red brick in the neo-Gothic style. The appearance of the temple is refined, elegant, as if striving for the sky. The building consists of one nave - an elongated rectangle - with four spans, and a pentagonal apse, in which the altar is located. Two rooms are attached to the nave as sacristies, where sacred vessels and vestments of the church ministers are kept. They form a transept, due to which the church has a cross-shaped appearance at the base. At the junction of the apse and the nave there is a signature - a small tower with a bell. The main facade of the church is decorated with a round stained-glass rose window, a pointed arch of the portal framing the main entrance, and a cornice ribbon with teeth. It goes into a two-tiered tetrahedral tower with a bell tower, crowned with a hipped sharp spire with pediments. The belfry is reinforced by small stepped buttresses, cut through by narrow pointed arches. The side facades of the building are divided into four parts by pinnacles - turrets repeating the lines of the bell tower, the walls are decorated with tall stained glass windows. The ribbed vaults inside the church rest on the walls, and the protruding choir balcony is reinforced by two hexagonal columns. The interior decoration is modest. The small altar is made of wood and decorated with carvings. Sculptures of angels are installed on it. Frescoes are painted above the entrances to the sacristies. A luxurious gate leads to the temple, harmoniously complementing the architectural ensemble, with three pointed spans and pyramidal phials crowning the columns. Next to it is a statue of the Virgin Mary.

The emergence of the Church of St. Alexei is closely connected with the history of the Belarusian town of Ivenets, a small urban settlement, as well as with the fate of the Catholic churches previously built there. In the second half of the 19th century, after the Kastus Kalinowski uprising, the wooden Church of the Holy Trinity, built in the 17th century, and the stone Church of St. Michael, built in the 18th century at the Franciscan monastery, were confiscated and converted into Orthodox Catholic churches in Ivenets. Despite the fact that there were no churches left in Ivenets to which believers could come, it was impossible to obtain permission to build a new church.

After the Kastus Kalinouski Uprising of 1863, the Catholic clergy fell out of favor with the authorities. As a result, most of the churches were transferred to Orthodox parishes. The Tsar's decree "On religious tolerance" appeared only in the spring of 1905, giving impetus to a wave of Belarusian Catholic construction. As an exception, in late autumn 1904, at the request of a military officer, Nicholas II gave his royal permission to build a church on the territory of a cemetery in the village of Ivenets. General Edward Kaverski and his wife Alzbeta Plevako, whose family owned local lands at the time, donated almost 30 thousand rubles for the construction of the church. Future parishioners also made a modest contribution. The construction of the church began a month after the Tsar's approval, according to a project created by the general's student, engineer and technologist Mikhail Khatovsky. The church was consecrated by the minister Jan Kozelevich in honor of Saint Alexei in the winter of 1907. Almost ten years later, the founder of the shrine died and was laid to rest in its crypt under the altar. Subsequently, almost all members of the Kaverski family found their final resting place in the cemetery near the church in Ivenets.

During World War II, the priests left the church. For the next fifteen years, the Red Church was closed and abandoned. Then, under Soviet rule, the building was renovated and a branch of the Minsk Lenin State Library was housed there. After some time, the institution became an archive warehouse, where books that were no longer relevant were stored. And only on October 14, 1988, the Church of St. Alexei returned to the hands of the Catholic Church. The church was later reconstructed, and is now open to believers.