Brest, formerly Brest-Litovsk (1600s–1923) and Brest-on-the-Bug (1923–1939), is a city in south-western Belarus at the border with Poland opposite the Polish town of Terespol, where the Bug and Mukhavets rivers meet, making it a border town. It serves as the administrative center of Brest Region and Brest District, though it is administratively separated from the district. The city was part of the Byelorussian SSR, and since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Brest has been part of independent Belarus.
Etymology
Several theories attempt to explain the origin of the city's name. The name was first mentioned in the Primary Chronicle as (); other variants of this traditional name included () and (). The traditional name rendered in Belarusian is (), which is still commonly used. The modern name in Ukrainian is (). The name could originate from Slavic root berest 'elm'. It could likewise have come from the Lithuanian word brasta 'ford'. The name was created by media in standard Lithuanian only at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Once a center of Jewish scholarship, the city has the Yiddish name (), hence the term "Brisker" used to describe followers of the influential Soloveitchik family of rabbis.
Brest became a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1319. In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth formed in 1569, the town became known in Polish as , historically (literally: "Lithuanian Brest", in contradistinction to Brześć Kujawski). became part of the Russian Empire under the name or (, , literally "Lithuanian Brest") in the course of the Third Partition of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795. After World War I, and the rebirth of Poland in 1918, the government of the Second Polish Republic renamed the city as ("Brest on the Bug") on 20 March 1923. After World War II, the city became part of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic with the name simplified as Brest.
Brest's coat of arms, adopted on 26 January 1991, features an arrow pointed upwards and a bow (both silver) on a sky-blue shield. An alternative coat of arms has a red shield. Sigismund II Augustus, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, first granted Brest a coat of arms in 1554.
History
thumb|upright|left|In 1019, Brest was first mentioned in chronicles as "Berestye"
As a town, Brest – Berestij in Kievan Rus – was first mentioned in the Primary Chronicle in 1019 when the Kievan Rus' took the stronghold from the Poles. It is one of the oldest cities in Belarus. It was hotly contested between the Polish rulers (kings, principal dukes and dukes of Masovia) and Kievan Rus princes. It was recaptured by Poland in 1020, and unsuccessfully besieged by Prince Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev in 1022. It was captured by Yaroslav the Wise, according to various sources, either in 1042 or 1044, remaining under Polish suzerainty until 1205, when Roman the Great rebelled against Poland, but was killed in action in the Battle of Zawichost. Passing under Polish suzerainty again, in 1207, it was granted by Leszek the White as a fief to Princess Anna-Euphrosyne and her children. From 1210, it was directly part of Poland, until it passed to Galicia–Volhynia either in 1215 or 1217.
Grand Duchy of Lithuania
In 1319, the city became part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and Grand Duke Gediminas stayed in the city in the winter of 1319–1320, preparing to capture Kyiv. Its suburbs were burned by the Teutonic Order in 1379. In 1385, it became part of the Polish–Lithuanian union. During the Lithuanian Civil War (1389–1392), in 1390, the city was captured by Polish forces of Władysław II Jagiełło.
In 1390, Brześć became the second city in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (after the capital Vilnius), and the first in the lands that now are Belarus, to receive Magdeburg rights. Given its proximity to Poland, it was a significant centre for trade with Poland. In 1410 the city mustered a cavalry banner that participated in the Polish-Lithuanian military victory at Grunwald.
In 1419 it became a seat of the starost in the newly created Trakai Voivodeship. Under Władysław II and Vytautas the city was significantly developed and granted privileges similar to those of the Polish city of Lublin. In 1425, the city hosted a congress attended by Władysław II, Vytautas, dukes of Masovia and Polish and Lithuanian nobles. In 1440, a Sejm of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was held in the city, at which Casimir IV Jagiellon was chosen Grand Duke of Lithuania. A royal mint was founded in the city by King John II Casimir Vasa in 1665.
thumb|Siege of Brześć by [[Erik Dahlbergh|E. Dahlbergh, 1657]]
In 1657, and again in 1706, the town and castle were captured by the Swedish Army during its invasions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Then, in an attack from the other direction, on 13 January 1660, the invading Streltsy of the Tsardom of Russia under Ivan Andreyevich Khovansky took the Brest Castle in an early morning surprise attack, the town having been captured earlier, and massacred the 1,700 defenders and their families (according to an Austrian observer, Captain Rosestein).
Partitions
On 23 July 1792, the defending Grand Ducal Lithuanian Army, under the leadership of Szymon Zabiełło, and the invading Imperial Russian Army fought a battle near Brześć. On 19 September 1794, the area between Brest and Terespol was the site of another battle won by the Russian invaders led by Alexander Suvorov over a Polish-Lithuanian division under General Karol Sierakowski. Thereafter, Brest was annexed by Russia when the Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth was partitioned for the third time in 1795.
19th century to World War I
thumb|left|[[Brest Fortress on a painting by Marcin Zaleski from 1846]]
During Russian rule in the 19th century, Brest Fortress was built in and around the city. The Russians demolished the Polish Royal Castle and most of the Old Town "to make room" for the fortress. The main Jewish synagogue in the city, the Choral Synagogue, was completed c. 1862. In 1895, a massive fire rendered 15,000 people homeless, and dozens were killed. Because of the proximity of the fortress, only wooden buildings could be erected in the city; masonry construction was permitted only in exceptional cases and to a limited height. After the fire, more masonry buildings began to appear.
During World War I, the town was captured by the Imperial German Army under August von Mackensen on 25 August 1915, during the Great Retreat of 1915. Shortly after Brest fell into German hands, war poet August Stramm, who has been called "the first of the Expressionists" and one of "the most innovative poets of the First World War," was shot in the head during an attack on nearby Russian positions on 1 September 1915.
thumb|Brest railway station during [[World War I, c. 1915]]
In March 1918, in the Brest Fortress at the confluence of the Bug and Mukhavets rivers on the city' western outskirts, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, ending the war between Soviet Russia and the Central Powers and transferring the city and its surrounding region to the sphere of influence of the German Empire. This treaty was subsequently annulled by the Paris Peace Conference treaties which ended the war and even more so by events and developments in Central and Eastern Europe. During 1918, the city became a part of the Volhynia Governorate of the Ukrainian People's Republic as a result of negotiations and own treaty between the delegation of the Ukrainian Central Rada and Central Powers.
Interwar Poland
On 9 February 1919, Polish troops entered the city, and it returned to Poland, which regained independence three months earlier. During the Polish–Soviet War it was occupied by the Soviet Russians on 1 August 1920, and recaptured by the Poles on 20 August, with borders formally recognized by the Treaty of Riga of 1921. In 1921, it became the temporary capital of the Polesie Voivodeship instead of Pińsk. It was renamed Brześć nad Bugiem (Brest on the Bug) on 20 March 1923.
thumb|left|Bank of Poland between the wars
During World War I, the city was destroyed by 70% and required reconstruction. The city was developed significantly and a number of representative public buildings were erected in Neoclassical and Modernist styles, especially at Ulica Unii Lubelskiej (Union of Lublin Street, now Lenin Street), including the Bank of Poland, Tax Chamber, Regional Chamber of the State Control, Healthcare Fund and Voivodeship Office. Other notable projects include the officials' housing estate, stylistically inspired by historic manor houses of Polish nobility and the garden city movement, and the Warburg Residential Colony, dedicated to poor Jews who had lost their homes in World War I, founded by Felix M. Warburg, chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee of American Funds for Jewish War Sufferers. In 1929, city limits were greatly expanded.
In the twenty years of Poland's sovereignty, of the total of 36 brand new schools established in the city, there were ten public, and five private Jewish schools inaugurated, with Yiddish and Hebrew as the language of instruction. The first-ever Jewish school in Brześć history opened in 1920, almost immediately after Poland's return to independence. In 1936 Jews constituted 41.3% of the Brześć population or 21,518 citizens. Some 80.3% of private enterprises were run by Jews. The Polish Army troops of the 9th Military District along with its headquarters were stationed in Brześć Fortress.
The city had an overwhelmingly Jewish population during Russian rule: 30,000 out of 45,000 total population according to Russian 1897 census, which fell to 21,000 out of 50,000 according to the Polish census of 1931.
World War II
thumb|260px|[[German–Soviet military parade in Brest-Litovsk at the conclusion of the Invasion of Poland. In the centre are Major General Heinz Guderian from the Wehrmacht and Brigadier Semyon Krivoshein from the Red Army.]]
In early September 1939, the Polish government evacuated a portion of the Polish gold reserve from Warsaw to Brześć, and then further southeast to Śniatyn at the Poland-Romania border, from where it was transported via Romania and Turkey to territory controlled by Polish-allied France.
During the German Invasion of Poland in 1939, the city was defended by a small garrison of four infantry battalions under General Konstanty Plisowski against General Heinz Guderian's XIX Panzer Corps. After four days of heavy fighting, the Polish forces withdrew southwards on 17 September. The Soviet invasion of Poland began on the same day. As a result, the Soviet Red Army entered the city at the end of September 1939 following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact's Secret Protocol, and a joint Nazi-Soviet military parade took place on 22 September 1939. While Belarusians consider it a reunification of the Belarusian nation under one constituency (the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic at that time), Poles consider it the date when the city was lost.
During the Soviet occupation (1939–41), the Polish population was subject to arrests, executions and mass deportations to Siberia and the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. The largest Soviet prison in the Byelorussian SSR was located in the city, and its prisoners were mostly Poles, including politicians, landowners, officers, educators, priests, both locals, including pre-war Polish mayor Franciszek Kolbusz, and people arrested in other places, including former Prime Minister of Poland Leopold Skulski, and Jews fleeing the Germans from western and central Poland. The prison had poor conditions, causing the spread of lice and bed bugs, and brutal interrogations, even resulting in two confirmed cases of suicide. It is suspected that they were murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn massacre in 1940.
The Polish resistance movement, including the Polesie District of the Home Army, was active in the city.
The city was re-occupied by the Red Army on 28 July 1944, and eventually annexed from Poland the following year.
Post-war period
In 1945, the Związek Obrońców Wolności ("Freedom Defenders Association") Polish resistance organization was founded in the city, with its activities including secret Polish schooling, rescuing historical Polish monuments from devastation and organising aid for repressed people and those in a difficult material situation. The organization was crushed by the NKVD in 1948, and its members were deported to Gulag forced labour camps for 25 years.
Geography
Brest lies astride the Mukhavets River which flows west through the city, dividing it into north and south, and meets the Bug River in the Brest Fortress. The river flows slowly and gently. Today the river looks quite broad in Brest. The terrain is fairly flat around Brest. The river has an extremely broad floodplain, that is about across. Brest was subject to flooding in the past. One of the worst floods in recorded history occurred in 1974.
Part of the floodplain was reclaimed with hydraulic mining. In the 1980s, big cutter-suction dredgers mined sand and clay from the riverbed to build up the banks.
In the 2000s, two new residential areas were developed in the southwest of Brest.
To the east of Brest, the Dnieper–Bug Canal was built in the mid-nineteenth century to join the river to Pina, a tributary of the Pripyat River which in turn drains into the Dnieper. Thus Brest has a shipping route all the way to the Black Sea. If not for a dam and neglected weirs west of Brest, north-western European shipping would be connected with the Black Sea also.
Climate
Brest has a humid continental climate but slightly leans towards oceanic due to the irregular winter temperatures that mostly hover around the freezing point. However, summers are warm and influenced by its inland position compared to areas nearer the Baltic Sea.