Virbalis

Virbalis, Wirballen German, Polish Wierzbołów, Russian Вержболово, is a city in Lithuania to the east of the border with the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast, formerly north of East Prussia.

The town has 1205 inhabitants and is the seat of the homonymous country Office ( kaimo seniūnija ) the Rajongemeinde Vilkaviškis which until 2010 belonged to the district Marijampolė 1994.

History

The peace of Melnosee had 1422 confirmed the affiliation of the area to Poland - Lithuania.

In the following period to protect the border, new settlements were established. The oldest written record of Virbalis (as Nowa Wola ) is dated to 1529 or 1526. Under Queen Bona Sforza, wife of King Sigismund I of Poland in 1593 the place was granted town rights under Magdeburg law. From the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 to the Peace of Tilsit in 1809, the city was part of the newly created province of South Prussia by the Kingdom of Prussia, then to 1815 Napoleon created the Duchy of Warsaw. Meanwhile, border demarcation in the south of Lithuania was maintained as a bound in personal union with Russia Kingdom of Poland was created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Its autonomy was progressively restricted until it went up in the Russian Weichselgouvernements.

As in 1851, the first connection between European standard gauge network ( Prussian Eastern Railway ) and Russian broad gauge network (Petersburg - Warsaw railway) was created, named one of the built when located closer to the border Kybartai border station first by the older, then more significant Virbalis. In the German -speaking world, he went down in history as a railway station Wirballen.

Since the proclamation of a newly independent Lithuania on 16 February 1918, the city whose history according belonged respectively to the Republic of Lithuania or a Lithuanian Soviet Republic, interrupted by the German occupation between 1941 and 1944. Until the Second World War, the city had a Catholic, a Lutheran and a Jewish community.

While the neighboring Kybartai gained importance, Virbalis fell back in the 20th century and the population did not recover even in the good times of the losses due to wars and deportations.