Virbalis
| Virbalis | |||
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| State : |
 Lithuania
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| District : | Marijampolė | ||
| Rajong municipality : | Vilkaviškis | ||
| Coordinates : | 54 ° 38 ′ N , 22 ° 49 ′ E | ||
| Inhabitants (place) : | 1,095 (2011) | ||
| Time zone : | EET (UTC + 2) | ||
| Postal code : | LT-70061 | ||
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Virbalis , German Wirballen , Polish Wierzbołów , Russian Вержболово, is a town in Lithuania east of the border with the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast , formerly north of East Prussia .
The city has 1,095 inhabitants and is the seat of the eponymous regional authority ( kaimo seniūnija ) of the district municipality of Vilkaviškis , which belonged to the Marijampolė district from 1994 to 2010 .
history
The Peace of Lake Melno in 1422 confirmed that the area belonged to Poland-Lithuania .
In the period that followed, new settlements were established to protect the border. The oldest written mention of Virbalis (as Nowa Wola) is dated to 1529 or 1526. Under Queen Bona Sforza , wife of King Sigismund I of Poland , the town was granted city rights under Magdeburg law in 1593 . From the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 to the Peace of Tilsit in 1809, the city belonged to the newly created Province of New East Prussia of the Kingdom of Prussia , then until 1815 to the Duchy of Warsaw, created by Napoleon . Its border in the south of Lithuania was retained when, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a Kingdom of Poland, bound in personal union to Russia, was created. Its autonomy was increasingly restricted until it became part of the Russian Vistula governorates.
When the first connection between the European standard gauge network ( Prussian Eastern Railway ) and the Russian broad gauge network ( Petersburg-Warsaw Railway ) was established in 1851, the border station built near the border near Kybartai was initially named after the older and then more important Virbalis. In the German-speaking area it went down in railway history as the Wirballen station .
Since the proclamation of a new independent Lithuania on February 16, 1918, the city has belonged to the Republic of Lithuania or the Lithuanian Soviet Republic, respectively, 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 neighboring Kybartai gained in importance, Virbalis fell back in the 20th century and the population did not recover from the losses caused by wars and deportations, even in good times.
people
- Wassili Wassiljewitsch Maté (1856–1917), Russian painter, draftsman and etcher