Golden age of Belarusian history

The Golden age of Belarusian history is the metaphorical term, relating to the period of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Particularly, it is sometimes used in relation to the Belarusian history of the entire 16th century.

This is sometimes related to certain relaxation, and even partial and temporary reversion, of the Polish and Catholic cultural-religious expansion (end of the 14th–17th centuries) to Ruthenian Lands (so, Eastern Slavic and Orthodox) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 1500s (decade)–1570s, especially in the 1550s–1570s. However, as a large percentage of the population of what is now Belarus had been Roman Catholic or Protestant at that time, this is not entirely correct.

The authorship of the term is attributed to the contemporary writer and publicist Fyodar Yewlashowski (Yewlashewski). In the Soviet propagandist literature, the authorship of the term had been sometimes incorrectly attributed to the "Belarusian bourgeois nationalists" (Soviet post-1920s political label for the non-Soviet Belarusian national activists), notably to Vaclau Lastouski.