Białystok County, Podlaskie Voivodeship

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, by road 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 (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. A town grew up 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.

Etymology

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 a clean, swift river (biały - clean, stok - stream; river that "slides" down the slope). So 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 be, Беласток (''Byelastok'' ^?, ''Biełastok'' ^? ), yi, ביאַליסטאָק (''Byalistok'', ''Bjalistok''), lt, Balstogė, and russian: Белосток (''Belostok'', ''Byelostok'').

History

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.

The city of Białystok has existed for five centuries and during this time the fate of the city has been affected by various political and economic forces.

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 Sigismund Kęstutaitis, Duke of Lithuania, a wilderness area along the river Biała that marked the beginning of Białystok as a settlement. Białystok administratively was part of the Podlaskie Voivodeship, after 1569 also part of the Lesser Poland Province of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland.

From 1547, the settlement was owned by the Wiesiołowski family, which founded the first school.Jacek Kusznier, ''Elektrycy w historii Politechniki Białostockiej'', "Maszyny Elektryczne - Zeszyty Problemowe", Nr 4/2018, p. 163 (in Polish) 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 . 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, , 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,Jacek Kusznier, ''Elektrycy w historii Politechniki Białostockiej'', "Maszyny Elektryczne - Zeszyty Problemowe", Nr 4/2018, p. 164 (in Polish) 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.

The end of the eighteenth century saw the division of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, in three steps, among the neighboring states. The Kingdom of Prussia acquired Białystok and the surrounding region during the third partition. The city became the capital of the New East Prussia province in 1795. Prussia lost the territory following Napoleon Bonaparte's victory in the War of the Fourth Coalition as the resultant 1807 Treaties of Tilsit awarded the area to the Russian Empire, 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. Later in the 19th century, Białystok grew into a significant center of the textile industry, the largest after Łódź in then-partitioned Poland. In 1862 a railway connection was launched, connecting Białystok with Warsaw, Grodno, Wilno and Saint Petersburg. 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, as a result of the influx 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 in the city. During the pogrom between 81 and 88 Jews were killed by the Russians, and about 80 people were wounded.
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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 (1919–1939). 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. Initially Białystok was briefly occupied by Germany, and the German '' Einsatzgruppe IV'' entered the city on September 20–21, 1939 to commit crimes against the population. Afterwards, the Germans handed the city over to the Soviet Union, 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. 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. The Great Synagogue was burnt down by Germans on June 27, 1941, with an estimated number of 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 August 15, 1943, the Białystok Ghetto Uprising began, and several hundred Polish Jews and members of the Anti-Fascist Military Organisation ( pl, 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.

The city fell under the control of the Red Army on 27 July 1944. The Soviets carried out mass arrests of Polish resistance members in the city and region, and imprisoned them in Białystok. On 20 September 1944 the city was transferred back to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s, and the Soviet NKVD and SMERSH continued the persecution of the Polish resistance in the following months. From November 1944 to January 1945, the Russians deported nearly 5,000 Poles from the local prison to the Soviet Union. Later on, the Soviet-appointed communists held political prisoners and other members of the Polish resistance in the local prison, and until 1956, they also carried out burials of executed Polish resistance members there.

After the war, the city became capital of the initial Białystok Voivodeship (1945–1975) of the People's Republic of Poland. After the 1975 administrative reorganization, the city was the capital of the smaller Białystok Voivodeship (1975–1998). Since 1999 it has been the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship, Republic of Poland.

Geography

Białystok is situated in the Białystok Uplands ( pl, Wysoczyzna Białostocka) of the Podlaskie Plain ( pl, Nizina Północnopodlaska), part of what is known collectively as the ''Green Lungs of Poland''. It is situated by road northeast of Warsaw.It is the biggest Polish city close to Belarus and Lithuania. The Biała River, a left tributary of the Supraśl River, passes through the city. The landscape of the Białystok Upland is diverse, with high moraine hills and kame in excess of above sea level. Vast areas of outwash, a glacial plain formed of sediments deposited by meltwater at the terminus of a glacier, are covered by forests.

The highest point of the city lies at a height of on the Pietrasze Forest. The lowest point lies at a height of on the river valley of the Biała.

Forests are an important part of the city character, they currently occupy approximately (18% of the administrative area of the city) which places it as the fifth most "wooded" city in Poland; behind Katowice (38%), Bydgoszcz (30%), Toruń (22.9%) and Gdańsk (17.6%).

Part of Knyszyn Forest is preserved within the city limits by two nature reserves—a total area of . The Zwierzyniecki Forest Nature Reserve ( pl, Rezerwat przyrody Las Zwierzyniecki), which is contained within the city limits, is a fragment, , of the riparian forest with a dominant assemblage of oak and hornbeam. The Antoniuk Nature Reserve ( pl, Rezerwat Przyrody Antoniuk) is a park in the city that preserves the natural state of a forest fragment characteristic of the Białystok Upland, with a dominant mixed forest of hazel and spruce.

The of forests lying in the vicinity of the Dojlidy Ponds are administered by the Białystok Central Sports and Recreation Center( pl, Białostocki Ośrodek Sportu i Rekreacji – BOSiR). The Dojlidy Ponds recreation area includes a public beach, walking trails, birdwatching and fishing.

Climate

The city has a warm-summer continental or hemiboreal climate (''Dfb'') according to the Köppen climate classification system under the isotherm for the average temperature of the coldest month, or an oceanic climate (''Cfb'') if the isotherm is used. The city would have been classified as being in the ''Dfb'' zone regardless of the accepted isotherm for climatological normal

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