section_path: Early life, family and education
section_name: Early life, family and education
paragraph_text: Early life, family and education
  
  Lukashenko was born on 30 August 1954 in the settlement of Kopys in Vitebsk Region of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Starting with an interview given in 2009, Lukashenko has said that his actual birthday is 31 August, the same as his son's Nikolai's. This caused some confusion as all official sources had said 30 August 1954 up until then. An explanation was later given that his mother had entered the hospital on the 30th in labour but not given birth until after midnight.
  
  His maternal grandfather, Trokhym Ivanovich Lukashenko, was born near Shostka in the then- Russian Empire, now in the Ukrainian village known today as Sobycheve. Lukashenko grew up without a father in his childhood, leading him to be taunted by his schoolmates for having an unmarried mother. Due to this, the origin of his patronymic Grigorevich is unknown and there are varying rumours about the identity of Lukashenko's father. The most common suggestion is that the man was a Roma passing through the region. His mother, Ekaterina Trofimovna Lukashenko (1924–2015), had given birth to another son, older than Alexander, who later died on an unknown date. Ekaterina worked unskilled jobs on a railway, at a construction site, at a flax factory in Orsha and finally as a milkmaid in Alexandria, a small village in the east of Belarus, close to the Russian border.
  
  Lukashenko went to Alexandria secondary school. He graduated from the Mogilev Pedagogical Institute (now Mogilev State A. Kuleshov University) in Mogilev in 1975 after 4 years of studies. He also completed studies at the Belarusian Agricultural Academy in Horki in 1985.