Kybartai

Kybartai
City
Eucharistic Saviour Church
Coat of arms
Country	Lithuania
Ethnographic region	Suvalkija
County	Marijampolė County
Municipality	Vilkaviškis district municipality
Eldership	Kybartai eldership
Capital of	Kybartai eldership
First mentioned	1561
Granted city rights	1856
Population  (2005)
• Total	6,395
Time zone	UTC+2 (EET)
• Summer (DST)	UTC+3 (EEST)

Kybartai () is a city in the Marijampolė County, Lithuania. It is located 20 km (12 mi) west of Vilkaviškis and is on the border of Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia.

History

Kybartai was founded under the reign of Sigismund I the Old by the colonization efforts of his wife, Bona Sforza. In 1561, it has been listed in the land-register of Jurbarkas and Virbalis.

Verzhbolovo Railway Station in Kybartai at about 1900

When in 1861 a branch of Saint Petersburg – Warsaw Railway was built from Vilnius to the Prussian border, where it was linked to Prussian Eastern Railway, the Russian border station near the village of Kybartai was named after the neighbouring town of Verzhbolovo (Вержболово), Lithuanian Virbalis, German Wirballen. Meanwhile, Kybartai has become a town bigger than Virbalis and the now Lithuanian border station is called Kybartai, too. The German station of the Prussian Eastern Railway on the western side of the frontier was Eydtkuhnen, today it is the Russian border station and called Chernyshevskoye (Чернышевское).

On June 30, 1941, an Einsatzgruppen of Germans and a few Lithuanian policemen perpetrated a mass execution of the local Jewish population. 106–116 men were murdered in a sand quarry.

From July to Automne 1941, other Jews from the town were assassinated with hundreds of victims from the nearby town of Virbalis on another execution site.

Persons born in Kybartai

• the Russian landscape painter Isaac Ilyich Levitan (Russian language: Исаак Ильич Левитан, 1860–1900)
• the Polish composer Emil Młynarski (1870–1935)
• the Lithuanian painter Jacob Mesenblum (1895–1933)
• the Austrian singer Harald Serafin (born 1931)
• the Lithuanian singer and politician Inga Valinskienė (born 1966)