Königsberg
Königsberg (German: [ˈkøːnɪçsbɛʁk] , lit. 'King's mountain', Polish: Królewiec, Lithuanian: Karaliaučius, Russian: Кёнигсберг, romanized: Kyonigsberg) is the historic German and Prussian name of the medieval city that is now Kaliningrad, Russia. The city was founded in 1255 on the site of the small Old Prussian settlement Twangste[3] by the Teutonic Knights during the Baltic Crusades. It was named in honour of King Ottokar II of Bohemia, who led a campaign against the pagan Old Prussians, a Baltic tribe.[4]
This article is about the city before 1945. For after 1945, see Kaliningrad. For other uses, see Königsberg (disambiguation).Coordinates
1255
1945
State of the Teutonic Order, Poland, Prussia, Russia, Germany
A Baltic port city, it successively became the capital of the Królewiec Voivodeship, State of the Teutonic Order, the Duchy of Prussia and the provinces of East Prussia and Prussia. Königsberg remained the coronation city of the Prussian monarchy from 1701 onwards, though the capital was Berlin. From the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries on, the inhabitants spoke predominantly German, although the city also had a profound influence upon the Lithuanian and Polish cultures. It was a publishing center of Lutheran literature, including the first Polish translation of the New Testament, printed in the city in 1551, the first book in Lithuanian and the first Lutheran catechism, both printed in Königsberg in 1547.
A university city, home of the Albertina University (founded in 1544), Königsberg developed into an important German intellectual and cultural center, being the residence of Simon Dach, Immanuel Kant, Käthe Kollwitz, E. T. A. Hoffmann, David Hilbert, Agnes Miegel, Hannah Arendt, Michael Wieck, and others. It was the easternmost large city in Germany until World War II. Between the wars, it was in the exclave of East Prussia, separated from Germany by the Polish Corridor.
The city was heavily damaged by Allied bombing in 1944 and during the Battle of Königsberg in 1945, when it was occupied by the Red Army. The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed it provisionally under Soviet administration, and it was annexed by the Soviet Union on 9 April 1945. Its small Lithuanian population was allowed to remain, but the Germans were expelled, the city being largely repopulated with Russians and, to a lesser degree, Ukrainians and Belarusians from the Soviet Union after the ethnic cleansing. It was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946, in honour of Soviet Communist functionary Mikhail Kalinin. The city's historic centre was subsequently demolished by the Soviet government.[1][2][5][6][7]
It is now the capital of Russia's Kaliningrad Oblast, an exclave bordered in the north by Lithuania and in the south by Poland. In the Final Settlement treaty of 1990, Germany renounced all claims to the city.
Name[edit]
The first mention of the present-day location in chronicles indicates it as the place of a village of fishermen and hunters. When the Teutonic Order began the Baltic Crusades, they built a wooden fortress, and later a stone fortress, calling it "Conigsberg", which later morphed into "Königsberg". The literal meaning of this is 'King's mountain', in apparent honour of King Ottokar II of Bohemia,[4] who led one of the Teutonic campaigns.
In Polish, it is called Królewiec, in Lithuanian Karaliaučius (calques of the original German name).[8]