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city and capital of Podlaskie Voivodeship in eastern Poland
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Białystok is the largest city in northeastern Poland and the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship. It is the tenth-largest city in Poland, second in terms of population density, and thirteenth in area.
Białystok is located in the Białystok Uplands of the Podlachian Plain on the banks of the Biała River, 200 km (124 mi) northeast of Warsaw. It has historically attracted migrants from elsewhere in Poland and beyond, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe. This is facilitated by the nearby border with Belarus also being the eastern border of the European Union, as well as the Schengen Area. The city and its adjacent municipalities constitute Metropolitan Białystok. The city has a warm summer continental climate, characterized by warm summers and long frosty winters. Forests are an important part of Białystok's character and occupy around 1,846 ha (4,560 acres) (18% of the administrative area of the city) which places it as the fifth-most forested city in Poland.
The first settlers arrived in the 14th century. The town grew and received its municipal charter in 1692. Białystok has traditionally been one of the leading centers of academic, cultural, and artistic life in Podlachia, and the most important economic center in northeastern Poland. Białystok was once an important center for light industry, which was the reason for the substantial growth of the city's population. The city continues to reshape itself into a modern middle-sized city. Białystok, in 2010, was on the short-list, but ultimately lost the competition, to become a finalist for European Capital of Culture in 2016.
Although nowadays "stok" is translated as "slope", the initial name of the settlement came from the river flowing through it. In old Polish, biały stok was white river (biały - white, stok - stream; river that "slides" down the slope). Inconspicuous today, the Biała River (usually called Białka), flowing through the city center, gave it its name.
Due to changing borders and demographics over the centuries, the city has been known as Belarusian: Беласток (Byelastok?, Biełastok? [bʲeɫaˈstok]), Yiddish: ביאַליסטאָק (Byalistok, Bjalistok), Lithuanian: Balstogė, and Russian: Белосток (Belostok, Byelostok).
Archaeological discoveries show that the first settlements in the area of present-day Białystok occurred during the Stone Age. Tombs of ancient settlers can be found in the district of Dojlidy. In the early Iron Age, people settled in the area producing kurgans, the tombs of the chiefs in the area located in the current village of Rostołty. Since then, the Białystok area has been at the crossroads of cultures. Trade routes linking the Baltic to the Black Sea favored the development of settlements with Yotvingia-Ruthenian-Polish cultural characteristics.
Surviving documents attest that around 1437 a representative of the Raczków family, Jakub Tabutowicz of the coat of arms Łabędź, received from Michael Žygimantaitis, son of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Sigismund Kęstutaitis, a wilderness area along the river Biała that marked the beginning of Białystok as a settlement. Thereafter, Białystok was part of Lithuania for 132 years.
The Union of Lublin in 1569 transferred the city to Poland, but it remained very close to its border with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania until the last partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. Białystok was administratively part of the Podlaskie Voivodeship, after 1569 also part of the Lesser Poland Province of the Kingdom of Poland.
From 1547, the settlement was owned by the Wiesiołowski family, which founded the first school. The first brick church and a castle were built between 1617 and 1826. The two-floor castle, designed on a rectangular plan in the Gothic-Renaissance style, was the work of Job Bretfus. Extension of the castle was continued by Krzysztof Wiesiołowski, starost of Tykocin, Grand Marshal of Lithuania since 1635, and husband of Aleksandra Marianna Sobieska. In 1637 he died childless, and as a result, Białystok came under the management of his widow. After her death in 1645 the Wiesiołowski estate, including Białystok, passed to the Crown to cover the costs of maintaining Tykocin Castle. In the years 1645–1659 Białystok was managed by the starosts of Tykocin.
In 1661 it was given to Stefan Czarniecki as a reward for his service in the victory over the Swedes during the Deluge. Four years later, it was given as a dowry of his daughter Aleksandra, who married Marshal of the Crown Court Jan Klemens Branicki, thus passing into the hands of the Branicki family. In 1692, Stefan Mikołaj Branicki, the son of Jan Klemens Branicki, obtained city rights for Białystok from King John III Sobieski. He constructed the Branicki Palace on the foundations of the castle of the Wiesiołowski family. In the first half of the eighteenth century the ownership of the city was inherited by Field Crown Hetman Jan Klemens Branicki. It was he who transformed the palace built by his father into a magnificent residence of a great noble, which was frequently visited by Polish kings and poets.
In 1745 the first military technical school in Poland was founded in Białystok, and in 1748, one of the oldest theaters in Poland, the Komedialnia, was founded in the city. New schools were established, including a ballet school in connection with the foundation of the theater. In 1749, King Augustus III of Poland extended the city limits. In 1770, under the auspices of Izabella Poniatowska, a midwifery school was founded, based on which the Institute of Obstetrics was established in 1805. Białystok was a regional brewing center with 33 breweries as of 1771, with the Podlachian Beer now listed as a protected traditional beverage by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development of Poland.
The end of the eighteenth century saw the division of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in three partitions, among Poland's neighboring states. The Kingdom of Prussia subjugated Białystok and the surrounding region during the 1795 third partition. That year, the city became the capital of the New East Prussia province.
Napoleon Bonaparte's victory in the War of the Fourth Coalition freed the territory but as a result in the Treaties of Tilsit in 1807 the area was transferred to the Russian Empire (rather than Congress Poland), which organized the region into the Belostok Oblast, with the city as the regional center. Schooling and higher learning in Białystok, which was intensively developed in the 18th century, was stopped as a result of partitions.
Białystok received city rights the latest from all of Podlasie's cities, but at the end of the 19th century it outgrown all the surrounding cities. The rapid development in the 19th century is related to two historical events: the creation of a customs border between the Russian Empire and the Congress Kingdom of Poland, and the opening in 1862 of the Warsaw Saint Petersburg railway line, connecting Białystok with Warsaw, Grodno, Vilnius and Saint Petersburg. Very convenient communication conditions influenced the development and concentration of Białystok's production plants at that time. Along with the administrative function, Białystok received many economic institutions. In the second half of the 19th century, Białystok grew into a significant center of the textile industry, the largest after Łódź in then-partitioned Poland. Białystok was the largest industrial center between Warsaw and Łódź in the west, Saint Petersburg in the north and Moscow in the east, and was nicknamed "Manchester of the North". After the failed November and January uprisings, Russification policies and anti-Polish repressions intensified, and after 1870 a ban on the use of Polish in public places was introduced. In 1912, a Tsarist prison was built, which also served as a transit prison for Poles deported to Siberia.
At the end of the nineteenth century, due to Russian discriminatory regulations, the majority of the city's population was Jewish. According to Russian census of 1897, out of the total population of 66,000, Jews constituted 41,900 (so around 63% percent). This heritage can be seen on the Jewish Heritage Trail in Białystok. The Białystok pogrom occurred between 14 and 16 June 1906 with some 81 to 88 Jews killed by the Russians, and about 80 wounded.
The first anarchist groups to attract a significant following of Russian workers or peasants were the anarcho-communist Chernoe-Znamia groups, founded in Białystok in 1903.
During World War I the Bialystok-Grodno District was the administrative division of German-controlled territory of Ober-Ost. It comprised the city, as the capital, and the surrounding Podlaskie region, roughly corresponding to the territory of the earlier Belostok Oblast.
At the end of World War I the city became part of the newly independent Second Polish Republic, as the capital of the Białystok Voivodeship. Białystok and the surroundings areas regained independence only on 19 February 1919, three months after the rest of Poland, due to delay in the departure of the German Army from the city. During the 1919–1920 Polish–Soviet War, possession of the city by the Red Army and the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee occurred during the lead up to the Battle of Warsaw. During the resultant counteroffensive, the city returned to Polish control after the Battle of Białystok.
After the wars and the reestablishment of independent Poland, Polish education in Białystok was restored and the textile industry was revived. A municipal public library was established, sports clubs were founded, including Jagiellonia Białystok, and in the 1930s a drama theater was built.
With the beginning of World War II, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. City president Seweryn Nowakowski established the Citizens' Guard. Due to the need to evacuate the police forces, the Guard took over its duties after 11 September 1939. In addition to the Police, a group of officials left along with selected archives. However, most of the residents of Białystok remained in the city. Initially Białystok was briefly occupied by Germany, and the German Einsatzgruppe IV entered the city on 20–21 September 1939 to commit crimes against the population. After occupying Białystok, the Germans established the Military City Command, which ordered the surrender of weapons and ammunition and the disbandment of the Citizens' Guard. On 20 September, a brutal murder was committed in the courtyard of Primary School No. 1, where a transit camp for prisoners had been set up earlier. Wehrmacht soldiers murdered 8 people "for disobedience". The next day, German troops began to withdraw from the city, where they were replaced by Red Army units, as a result of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
Under Soviet occupation, it was incorporated into the Byelorussian SSR from 1939 to 1941 as the capital of Belastok Region and became a subject to massive sovietization. Polish people were subject to deportations deep into the USSR (Siberia, Kazakhstan, Far North). Pre-war mayor Seweryn Nowakowski was arrested by the NKVD in October 1939 and probably also deported to the USSR, however his fate remains unknown. The NKVD took over the local prison. The Polish resistance movement was active in the city, which was the seat of one of the six main commands of the Union of Armed Struggle in occupied Poland (alongside Warsaw, Kraków, Poznań, Toruń and Lwów). Białystok native and future President of Poland in exile Ryszard Kaczorowski was a member of the local Polish resistance and was arrested in the city by the NKVD in 1940. Initially the Soviets sentenced him to death, but eventually he was sentenced to 10 years in forced labor camps and deported to Kolyma, from where he was released in 1942, when he joined the Anders' Army.
In the course of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Białystok was occupied by the German Army on 27 June 1941, during the Battle of Białystok–Minsk, and the city became the capital of Bezirk Białystok, a separate region in German occupied Poland, until 1944. Between 27 June and 13 July the 1941 Białystok massacres took place. The Great Synagogue was burnt down by Germans on 27 June 1941, with an estimated 2,000 Jews inside. From the very beginning, the Nazis pursued a ruthless policy of pillage and removal of the non-German population. The Germans operated a Nazi prison in the city, and a forced labour camp for Jewish men. Since 1943, the Sicherheitspolizei carried out deportations of Poles including teenage boys from the local prison to the Stutthof concentration camp. The 56,000 Jewish residents of the town were confined in a ghetto. On 15 August 1943, the Białystok Ghetto Uprising began, and several hundred Polish Jews and members of the Anti-Fascist Military Organisation (Polish: Antyfaszystowska Organizacja Bojowa) started an armed struggle against the German troops who were carrying out the planned liquidation of the ghetto with deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. Ultimately the ghetto was liquidated, and the vast majority of its remaining 40,000 occupants including men, woman and children, were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, primarily at the Treblinka death camp.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Białystok”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.