On the eve of the great and sacred holiday—Victory Day—students from the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering took a tour of Pogranichny Island.

The island is located on the left bank of the Western Bug River and is a border zone, open to organized tour groups only since 2013. Before the war, it was part of the Brest Fortress and known as the Terespol Fortress, built in the 1830s.

On the eve of the Great Patriotic War, the island was home to Red Army soldiers, detachments from the 9th Outpost of the 17th Border Detachment, and the families of commanders. Around 300 people were on the island when the war began; they were the first to come under a barrage of German artillery fire on the unforgettable morning of June 22, 1941.

During the excursion, the students saw and visited powder magazines built between 1887 and 1889, caponiers, casemates in the earthen rampart, a barracks that housed a sergeant's school and whose walls bear inscriptions from the early 20th century, a redoubt built in the 1830s to provide flanking fire in two opposing directions, and a bathhouse built in 1880. Everyone was amazed by the unforgettable view from the island of the fortress in the area of ​​the Terespol Gate, which was connected to the island by a wooden bridge in 1941. It is important to note that the new suspension bridge located downstream, which provides access to Pogranichny Island, was designed by the faculty of the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering of Brest State Technical University, with Vyacheslav Ignatyevich Dragan as the project manager.

All tour participants received a true lesson in patriotism, walking the length of Pogranichny Island, which became a stronghold of courage and heroism for the defenders of the Brest Fortress in the early days of the war.