# Hanna Barysiewicz

Hanna Adamauna Barysiewicz, Belarusian: Ганна Адамаўна Барысевiч, Russian: Анна Адамовна Борисевич (born 18 May [O.S. 6 May] 1888 in Ihumen; died 23 February 2007 in Minsk) was the oldest female resident of Belarus not registered by the Guinness Book of Records. Until her death, she was the oldest resident in the country and, according to the media, in the world. She lived 118 years and 281 days.

## Early life

Hanna Barysiewicz was born in the village of Buda near Ihumen, to a peasant family of Adam Nowicki and his second wife, Józefa. When she was sixteen months old (four months according to other data), her mother died. Her father remarried. Hanna Barysiewicz was raised by her older stepsister and grandmother.
When Hanna Barysiewicz was a child, her family moved to Stary Kojczyn (now Byerazino District). Her father, Adam Nowicki, purchased a piece of land from the owner of the manor. As payment, the Nowicki family worked on the landowner's land. Hanna Barysiewicz did not attend school and could not write or read:
   Girls and older women were not taught to write. Under Lenin in likbez they were taught how to make a signature.
During World War I, Hanna Barysiewicz's older half-brother (son of Adam Nowicki from his first marriage) was killed at the front. In 1917, at the age of 29, she married Ipalit Barysiewicz, a member of the Selsoviet. She gave birth to seven children, four of whom died in early childhood. Nina, Valancina and Jauhien reached adulthood. In 1937, her husband, whom the Soviet authorities considered an enemy of the people, was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Ipalit Barysiewicz died in 1940. In interviews, Hanna Barysiewicz hardly talked about him, only mentioning that she had forgiven him. She did not remarry.
During the period of collectivization, Hanna Barysiewicz took a job at the kolkhoz in Stary Kojczyn and worked there until her retirement. During the German-Soviet war, Hanna Barysiewicz's family helped partisans. Stary Kojczyn, where she lived, was invaded by German occupiers in 1941, but the village was recaptured by partisan units shortly thereafter. In 1965, at the age of 77, she retired. In 1983, at the age of 95, she moved to Minsk, to her daughter Nina's apartment. She died on 23 February 2007, leaving three children, thirteen grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren.

## Longevity record

The media became interested in Hanna Barysiewicz in 2004. When the woman exchanged her passport, officials noted the petitioner's age - 115. Initially a mistake was suspected.
Prior to the release of the Guinness Book of Records for 2007, the Belarusian side put forward the candidacy of Hanna Barysiewicz as a record holder of longevity, but the Belarusian resident was left out. The reason for this was the doubts of the editors of the publishing house, who did not trust documents published in the former USSR. In 2007, the official longevity record holder was a 114-year-old resident of Japan, while Hanna Barysiewicz was 118 years old at the time.
In 2007, Hanna Barysiewicz's name as a longevity record holder was entered in the Book of Records of Russia, CIS and Baltic States "Diwo" (Книгу рекордов России, стран СНГ и Прибалтики "Диво").

## Media presence

Hanna Barysiewicz has been the heroine of many interviews and nationally broadcast radio and television programs in several countries since 2004. The media tried to discover the "secret" of her longevity, and were interested in the heroine's health condition, diet, views and attitude to the world.

### Eye surgery

In the spring of 2005, Hanna Barysiewicz was the heroine of a program on Radio Liberty. During the broadcast, issues related to her health were raised. Among other things, it was mentioned that the woman was losing her eyesight. The program did not go unnoticed. Alena Dzianisawa, head of the Belarusian company Alkon, which specializes in the production of ophthalmological devices, became interested in Barysiewicz's case. She made a proposal to study the woman's health and prepare her for eye surgery. The tests showed that the biological age of the 117-year-old Barysiewicz could be estimated at 75 years. The patient was also diagnosed with cataracts, which was the cause of her vision loss. The surgery was performed by Ihar Pashkin, a candidate of medical sciences. It was planned to implant an artificial lens. The procedure, which lasted 25 minutes, was performed for charity at the Minsk Ophthalmology Hospital Optimied. The case of the surgery was widely reported in the media as setting a record for operating on the oldest patient in the world. A surgery on the second eye was also planned, but did not take place due to Barysiewicz's death.

### Lifestyle

Hanna Barysiewicz attributed the reason for her longevity to her calm character and philosophical approach to life. She did not complain about difficulties and problems and assured that there were many good things in her life. Barysiewicz never followed any diet. She consumed ordinary peasant food, as she said in interviews: pork rind, potatoes, milk, eggs, cream, butter and vegetables from her garden. She did not smoke cigarettes, used alcohol moderately, and claimed that she never got drunk in her life. Until the end of her life, Hanna Barysiewicz retained her mental clarity and good memory.
Hanna Barysiewicz declared her affiliation with the Roman Catholic Church and regretted that she could not attend church due to old age.

### Barysiewicz as a witness to history

Journalists were interested in Hanna Barysiewicz as a witness to history. She was called in the Belarusian press "a peer of three centuries" (ровесница трех веков). They inquired about her attitude toward the authorities of successive regimes, Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev. They also asked questions about her attitude toward the Belarusian government of the time. In her answer, the woman highlighted the repetition of history. Of all political activists, she respected Vladimir Lenin the most:
   He dispersed the capitalists, gave land to the people. [...] Stalin quickly chased everyone into kolkhozes.
She believed that the best period of her life was the Brezhnev era:
   Under Brezhnev. When they abolished the tax on every fruit tree. We began to peacefully grow anything we wanted in our garden. And we paid nothing for it.
She was ambivalent about Alexander Lukashenko's presidency and the policies implemented by him. She believed that the district and city authorities were deceiving citizens because they were not meeting their demands. During an interview with the opposition media on her one hundred and seventeenth birthday, referring to the attitude of the authorities toward veterans of the Great Patriotic War, she expressed the view of unequal treatment of war heroes and ordinary citizens:
   Military men fought the war with guns, and I fought with a shovel on the land. We dug with the shovel and sowed, because there were no horses, the Germans took them, so I harnessed myself to the plow. Now we don't have any privileges, and those, the military, do. They deserved, and we, who fed the partisans, did not deserve. They gave the military a good pension, and they didn't even give me a good pension...
Hanna Barysiewicz was skeptical of the church hierarchy at the end of her life. In interviews, she spoke of the decline of the authority of clerical power:
   Previously, the priest or pop was the father and judge, now - it's just a lie, they care only about their welfare.