Grodno

A 16th-century view of Hrodna

To aid the reconstruction of trade and commerce, the grand dukes allowed the creation of a Jewish commune in 1389. It was one of the first Jewish communities in the grand duchy. In 1441 the city received its charter, based on the Magdeburg Law.

As an important centre of trade, commerce, and culture, Hrodna was a notable royal city and was also one of the royal residences and political centers of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Old and New Castles were often visited by the Commonwealth monarchs including famous Stephen Báthory of Poland who made a royal residence there. Kings Casimir IV Jagiellon and Stephen Báthory died there. Hrodna was one of the places where the Sejms of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth were held, incl. the last Sejm in the history of the Commonwealth in 1793.

The New Castle in Hrodna used to be a summer residence of Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth monarchs

The city was the site of two battles, Battle of Hrodna (1706) and Battle of Hrodna (1708) during the Great Northern War.

After the Second Partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and a subsequent administrative reform of the remainder of the Commonwealth, Hrodna became the capital of the short-lived Grodno Voivodeship in 1793.

In 1795, Russia annexed the city in the Third Partition of Poland. It was in the New Castle on 25 November that year that the last Polish king and Lithuanian grand duke Stanisław August Poniatowski abdicated. In the Russian Empire, the city continued to serve its role as a seat of Grodno Governorate since 1801. The industrial activities started in the late 18th century by Antoni Tyzenhaus, continued to develop.

Count Aleksander Bisping was arrested and imprisoned here during the January Uprising (1863-1864) before his exile to Ufa.[5]^{: 210–211}

Like many other cities in Eastern Europe, Hrodna had a significant Jewish population before the Holocaust: according to Russian census of 1897, out of the total population of 46,900, Jews constituted 22,700 (around 48%, or almost half of the total population).[6]

Ambulance carriage on narrow gauge railway, 1916

After the outbreak of World War I, Hrodna was occupied by Germany (3 September 1915) and ceded by Bolshevist Russia under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. After the war the German government permitted a short-lived state to be set up there, the first one with a Belarusian name—the Belarusian People's Republic. This declared its independence from Russia in March 1918 in Minsk (known at that time as Mensk), but then the BNR's Rada (Council) had to leave Minsk and fled to Hrodna. All this time the military authority in the city remained in German hands.

After the outbreak of the Polish–Bolshevik War, the German commanders of the Ober Ost feared that the city might fall to Soviet Russia, so on 27 April 1919 they passed authority to Poland, which just regained independence several months earlier. The city was taken over by the Polish Army the following day and Polish administration was established in the city. The city was lost to the Red Army on 20 July 1920 in what became known as the First Battle of Hrodna.[7] The city was also claimed by Lithuanian government, after it was agreed by the Soviet–Lithuanian Treaty of 1920 signed on 12 July 1920 in Moscow that the city would be transferred to Lithuania. However, Soviet defeat in the Battle of Warsaw made these plans obsolete, and Lithuanian authority was never established in the city. Instead, the Red Army organised its last stand in the city and the Battle of Neman took place there. On 23 September the Polish Army recaptured the city. After the Peace Treaty of Riga, Hrodna remained in Poland.

View of Hrodna in 1935

Initially, prosperity was reduced due to the fact that the city remained only the capital of a powiat, while the capital of the voivodeship was moved to Białystok. However, in the late 1920s the city became one of the biggest Polish Army garrisons. This brought the local economy back on track. Also, the city was a notable centre of Jewish culture, with roughly 37% of the city's population being Jewish, while Poles constituted 60% of the inhabitants of Hrodna.

The Old Grodno Castle

During the Polish Defensive War of September to October 1939 the garrison of Hrodna was mostly used for the formation of numerous military units fighting against the invading Wehrmacht. In the course of the Soviet invasion of Poland (initiated on 17 September 1939) heavy fighting took place in the city between Soviet and improvised Polish forces, composed mostly of march battalions and volunteers.[8] In the course of the Battle of Hrodna (20-22 September) the Red Army lost some hundred men (according to Polish sources; according to Soviet sources – 57 killed and 159 wounded) and also 19 tanks and 4 APCs destroyed or damaged. The Polish side suffered at least 100 killed in action, military and civil, but losses still remain uncertain in detail (Soviet sources claim 644 killed and 1543 captives with many guns and machine guns etc. captured). Over 300 captured Polish defenders of the city, including Polish Army officers and youth, were massacred afterwards by the Soviets.[9] After the Soviet forces surrounded the engaged Polish units, the escaping Polish units withdrew to Lithuania.

In accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, the city was occupied by the Soviet Union and annexed into the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Several thousand of the city's Polish inhabitants were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union. On 23 June 1941 the city came under German occupation that lasted until 16 July 1944. It was administered as part of the Bialystok District. Surviving inmates of the Hrodna prison were released and the scale of the NKVD prisoner massacres revealed.[10] In the course of the Operation Barbarossa in World War II, the majority of Jews were herded by the Nazis into the Hrodna Ghetto and subsequently killed in extermination camps.[11] The Germans also operated a Nazi prison in the city.[12]

New (2018) manhole cover with the name of the city of Grodno in Chinese, 格羅德諾, City Center, Saviecka Street

Since 1945, the city has been a centre of one of the provinces of the Byelorussian SSR, now of the independent Republic of Belarus. Most of the Polish inhabitants were expelled or fled to Poland in 1944–1946 and 1955–1959. However nowadays Poles are still the second-most numerous nationality in the city (25%), after Belarusians (60%).

Jews began to settle in Hrodna in the 14th century after the approval given to them by the Lithuanian Grand Duke Vytautas.[13] During the next years, their status had changed several times and in 1495 the Jews were deported from the city and banned from settling in Hrodna (the ban was lifted in 1503). In 1560 there were 60 Jewish families in Hrodna. They were concentrated on the "Jewish street" with their own synagogue and "hospital". In the year 1578 the great synagogue of Hrodna was built by rabbi Mordehai Yaffe (Baal ha-Levush). The synagogue was severely damaged in a fire in 1599.

The community was not affected by the Khmelnytsky uprising but suffered during the 1655 Cossack uprising and during the war with Sweden (1703–1708). After Hrodna was annexed by the Russian empire in 1795 the Jewish population continued to grow and in 1907 there were 25,000 Jews out of a total population of 47,000.

In the period of independent Poland, a yeshiva had operated in the city (Shaar ha-Tora) under the management of Rabbi Shimon Shkop. Before the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland there were about 25,000 Jews in Hrodna out of 50,000 total population.[14] During the German occupation of the town, on 1 November 1942 the Jews were concentrated in 2 ghettos. 15,000 men were confined to the old part of the city where the main synagogue was located. A high wall of 2 meters was built around the ghetto. The second ghetto was located in the Slovodka part of the city with 10,000 inhabitants. The head of the Judenrat was appointed Dr. Braur (or Brawer), the school's headmaster, who served in this duty until his execution in February 1943 during a roundup for a deportation to Treblinka.[15]

On 2 November 1942 the deportations to the death camps began and during 5 days in February 1943, 10,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. Later, on 13 February, 5,000 Jews were sent to Treblinka. During the deportations, many synagogues were looted and some people were murdered. The last Jews were deported in March 1943. By the end of the war, only one Jew had remained in the ghetto. However, a few hundred survived in the camps or in hiding in the area. Perhaps as many as 2000 survived, including those who fled or were deported to the USSR.[16]

After the war, the Jewish community was revived. Most of the Jews emigrated after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today there are several hundred Jews in the city with most of the community's activity centralized in the main synagogue that had been returned to the community by the authorities in the 1990s.[13] The head of the community is Rabbi Yitzhak Kaufman.

A memorial plaque, commemorating the 25,000 Jews who were exterminated in the two ghettos in the city of Hrodna was placed on a building in Zamkavaja vulica, where the entrance to the ghetto once was.[17]

The Köppen Climate Classification subtype for this climate is "Dfb" (Warm Summer Continental Climate).[19]

Kalozha, an Orthodox church of Sts. Boris and Gleb, 12th century

The oldest extant structure in Hrodna is the Kalozha Church of Sts. Boris and Gleb (Belarusian: Каложская царква). It is the only surviving monument of ancient Black Ruthenian architecture, distinguished from other Orthodox churches by prolific use of polychrome faceted stones of blue, green or red tint which could be arranged to form crosses or other figures on the wall.[22]

The church was built before 1183 and survived intact until 1853, when the south wall collapsed, due to its perilous location on the high bank of the Neman. During restoration works, some fragments of 12th-century frescos were discovered in the apses. Remains of four other churches in the same style, decorated with pitchers and coloured stones instead of frescos, were discovered in Hrodna and Vaŭkavysk. They all date back to the turn of the 13th century, as do remains of the first stone palace in the Old Castle.

Baroque landmarks of Grodno

Jesuit Cathedral (1678–1705)

Bridgettine convent (1642)

The Cathedral of St. Francis Xavier stands on Batory Square (now: Soviet Square). The cathedral was a Jesuit church until 1773. This specimen of high Baroque architecture, exceeding 50 metres in height, was started in 1678. Due to wars that rocked Poland-Lithuania at that time, the cathedral was consecrated only 27 years later, in the presence of Peter the Great and Augustus the Strong. Its late Baroque frescoes were executed in 1752.

The extensive grounds of the Bernardine monastery (1602–18), renovated in 1680 and 1738, display all the styles flourishing in the 17th century, from Gothic to Baroque. The interior is considered a masterpiece of so-called Vilnius Baroque. Other monastic establishments include the old Franciscan cloister (1635), Basilian convent (1720–51, by Giuseppe Fontana III), the church of the Bridgettine cloister (1642, one of the earliest Baroque buildings in the region) with the wooden two-storey dormitory (1630s) still standing on the grounds, and the 18th-century buildings of the Dominican monastery (its cathedral was demolished in 1874).

Other sights in Hrodna include the Orthodox cathedral, a polychrome Russian Revival extravaganza from 1904; the botanical garden, the first in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, founded in 1774; a curiously curved building on the central square (1780s); a 254-metre-high TV tower (1984); and Stanisławów, a summer residence of the last Polish king.

Hrodna is twinned with:[40]

Former twin towns:

• Augustów, Poland[41]
• Białystok, Poland[42]
• Słupsk, Poland[43]

In March 2022, the Polish cities of Augustów, Białystok and Słupsk terminated their partnership with Hrodna as a consequence of Belarus's involvement in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.