For centuries, wood has been the basic building material in Belarus. Wood was used not only to build peasant cottages and manor houses of the landed gentry, but also to construct a significant proportion of urban buildings, churches of various rites and landed gentry residences. Burnt during both world wars, destroyed during the Soviet era or - at best - unrepaired and slowly devastated after 1945, monuments of wooden architecture are disappearing from the landscape of Belarus at an alarming rate. One example is the Rejtan manor in Hrusovka.

Preserved to this day in a state of disrepair, the manor house is a spacious, eleven-axis building with a gabled roof and two façades. It was built by Józef Rejtan at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, in a style fashionable at the time, referring to spa architecture. Its characteristic elements, such as the large balcony above the entrance and the carpentry ornamentation on the façade, have been largely destroyed.

The mansion was originally not surrounded by a park, with only a few old trees growing in its vicinity, and the driveway was decorated with a circular flower bed. In the immediate vicinity were outbuildings, of which the red-brick stables and the stone-built icehouse have survived to this day.

Rejtan family nest

Situated between Baranovichi and Klecko, Hrusivka was in the Novogrudok voivodeship in the First Republic. In the hands of the Rejtans, a family of German origin settled in the territory of the Commonwealth around 1600, the estate was located from the mid-17th century. In the mid-18th century, a classicist manor house, known from Napoleon Orda's drawing, was built in Hruszówka.

The last descendant of the family, Józef Rejtan, for some unknown reason demolished the old manor house and built the one existing until today in its place. After Rejtan's death in 1910, the remaining landed estate was divided between the descendants of his two sisters, Maria Grabowska and Jadwiga Czapska.

After the Treaty of Riga, Hruszówka luckily found itself on the Polish side of the border (it was only 30 km from the USSR) and became part of the reactivated Novogrudok voivodship.

Tadeusz Rejtan

The most famous representative of the family, Tadeusz Rejtan (1742-1780), a famous member of the Novogrudok voivodship at the Partition Sejm of 1773, was born and died in Hruszówka. According to family tradition, after an unsuccessful protest and approval by the Sejm of the First Partition of the Republic, Rejtan returned to his family estate and there fell into insanity. He spent the last years of his life locked up by his relatives (he did not found a family himself) in a "brick house", an outbuilding located near the manor house. There he is supposed to have committed suicide by cutting himself with glass.

His burial place is unknown. In 1930, an examination was made of the remains dug up in Hruszówka, which, however, did not yield certain findings. Successive owners of the manor maintained a private memorial room for Tadeusz Rejtan in the "brick house", which contained his surviving archives, personal memorabilia and furniture. Most of them have been lost, but individual objects (e.g. a gold goblet) survived because the family donated them to the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków in the inter-war period.

In the 1860s, near the manor house in Hruszówka, Tadeusz Rejtan's cousin's grandson, Stefan Rejtan, erected a monument to him. The bust was hidden during the January Uprising and later transported to Krakow. In 1890 the monument was set up in Planty, but in 1946 it was damaged by a storm and moved to the National Museum in Krakow. In 2007 a faithful copy of the monument was unveiled in its original location.