Skip to content
Mixroutes
Hrodna
City in Grodno Region, Belarus

Hrodna

Grodno, or Hrodna, is a city in western Belarus.

Plan a trip to Hrodna→From Vilnius

It is one of the oldest cities in Belarus. The city is located on the Neman River, 300 kilometres (190 mi) from Minsk, about 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from the border with Poland, and 30 kilometres (19 mi) from the border with Lithuania. Grodno serves as the administrative center of Grodno Region and Grodno District, though it is administratively separated from the district. As of 2025, the city has a population of 363,718.

Get in

Getting to Hrodna

Western parts of Grodno oblast form the so called “Grodno tourist region” foreigners from EU and some other western countries can visit without a visa for up to 15 days. Instead of a visa, a tourist voucher costing about €12 is needed. These can be obtained online from travel agencies like “Grodno Visa Free” or “Belarus visa free”. It is not necessary to book more tourist services than you need.

  1. 01
    Grodno

    Roads are pretty good, you can easily get here from Minsk, Brest, Vilnius (Lithuania), Białystok, Warsaw (Poland).

See

Worth seeing

  1. 01
    Kalozha Church

    A 12th-century Orthodox church, one of the few surviving monuments of the Old Rus period in the country.

  2. 02
    St Francis Xavier Cathedral

    A fine Baroque basilica, once a church of a Jesuit monastery, now the city's Roman Catholic cathedral.

  3. 03
    Old Hrodna Castle

    The present appearance of this royal residence was mostly shaped in 16th century, when it was renovated in Renaissance fashion for King Stephen Bathory.

  4. 04
    Fire Tower

    The old Fire Tower built at the end of 19th century.

  5. 05
    Hrodna Zoo

    Hrodna Zoo is next to the railway station.

  6. 06
    Great Synagogue
Do

Things to do

Bike. The relatively flat and beautiful landscape around Grodno present a good place to bike. When planning your biking trip, use OpenStreetMap based app, such as mapy.cz, as these seem to have the best coverage.

Eat

Where to eat

Retro Pizza, 31 Sovetskaya St (Follow the long pedestrian street down from the main square. Near Lenin Square). Good pizzas here. The menu is only in Russian, but some staff speak English, and some dishes (not the pizzas) have pictures to point to. Pizza Kofe, 15 Kirova St,. Good pizza and poor coffee. 6.50 rubles for medium pizza and 8.50 rubles for big one.

How locals move

Getting around Hrodna the local way

  • Get inIf coming by car from Poland or Lithuania, be sure to fill the customs declaration, even on one day trip using the visa free regime.

From Wikivoyage: Grodno, CC BY-SA. Not yet checked by us. Last edited 2026-09.

Text adapted from Wikipedia and Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photograph: Wikimedia Commons (see file page), Wikimedia Commons.