Kybartai

Kybartai (Kibarten, קיבאַרט, Кибартай) is a town in Marijampolė County, Vilkaviškis District Municipality in south-western Lithuania. It is located 20 km 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, Queen Bona Sforza. In 1561, it was listed in the land-register of Jurbarkas and Virbalis.

When in 1861 a branch of the Saint Petersburg–Warsaw Railway was built from Vilnius to the Prussian border, where it was linked to the 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).

In 1914, Kybartai had 10 000 inhabitants. The town was destroyed in World War I, but soon recovered and grew again. In 1919 and 1924, Kybartai was granted town rights and privileges. Small businesses began to set up. In 1919, the Žiburys Society founded a secondary school (later to become a gymnasium). Lithuanian, German and Jewish schools and folk universities were established.

In 1919, the first football club in Lithuania, FK Sveikata, was founded. In 1923, the town recorded a population of 6000. In 1927-1928, the Eucharistic Saviour Church was built according to the design of architect Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis.

Kybartai was the last place where President Antanas Smetona was staying in Lithuania. Late in the evening of 15 June 1940, when the Soviet Army invaded Lithuania, President Smetona fled from Kybartai to Germany after crossing the Liepona stream. On 23 June 1940, the Kybartai Acts were signed actually in Bern, but dated retrospectively by 15 June supposedly in Kybartai, marking the formal transfer of power to the so-called Provisional Government of Lithuania when Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Army.

During World War II, Kybartai was again severely devastated (only 100 inhabitants remained). On June 30, 1941, an Einsatzgruppe 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 Autumn 1941, other Jews from the town were executed with hundreds of victims from the nearby town of Virbalis on another execution site.

In 1945, the Kybartai Secondary School was founded and in 1964 was named after Kristijonas Donelaitis.

People 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 Polish ethnographer Maria Znamierowska-Prüfferowa (1898-1990)
 * the Austrian singer Harald Serafin (born 1931)
 * the Lithuanian singer and politician Inga Valinskienė (born 1966)