Kobryn (Belarusian. Kobrin, Ukrainian. Kobrin) is a city in the
Brest region of Belarus, the administrative center of the Kobryn
district.
The fourth most populous city in the region
(inferior to Brest,
Baranovichi and Pinsk). As of January 1, 2020,
the population of the city was 52 600 people.
The city is
located in the west of Polesie on the flat banks of the Mukhavets
River at its junction with the Dnieper-Bug Canal, 41 km east of
Brest. The area of the city is 31.6 km². The length from north to
south and from west to east is about eight kilometers.
Kobryn
is an important road transport hub. The city is crossed by the M1
motorways (Brest-Moscow; part of the European route E30 and
Pan-European transport corridor II Berlin-Nizhny Novgorod), M12
(Kobrin - Ukrainian border [Mokrany]; part of the European route
E85), as well as the M10 motorway (Kobryn-Gomel) , connecting the
regional centers of Polesie. In addition, the republican roads P2
(part of the old Brest-Moscow road from Stolbtsy to Kobrin) and P102
(Poland's border — Vysokoe — Kamenets — Kobryn) pass through the
city.
The importance of the city from the point of view of
railway transport is not so great. Located on the line of the
Polesie railways, the Kobryn station is not a junction and is
located 23 km from the Zhabinka station, which is a railway junction
(directions to Brest, Minsk and Gomel).
Urban public
transport is represented by buses (17 routes) and fixed-route taxis.
The service standard for urban transport, excluding buses of
individual entrepreneurs, more than 1 bus per 2000 people is
exceeded by 16%.
There are three road bridges in the city -
in the center, in the western part, and in the eastern part, as well
as a railway bridge across the Mukhavets River.
According to
the available data, it is impossible to determine the date of
foundation of the settlement, which arose during the fortification
at the confluence of the Kobrinka River with the Mukhavets River.
During the exploration of the pit in 1999 by the archaeologist OV
Iov, remains of ceramics of the 9th-10th centuries were found.
Earlier in the city at a depth of 1.5-2 meters, fragments of an old
pavement made of logs were found.
Manor house (1790; now the house-museum of Suvorov is located
here)
Spassky Monastery (second half of the 18th century)
Monument in honor of the first major victory of the Russian army
over Napoleon on July 27, 1812
Park named after Suvorov (1768).
Suvorov Military History Museum (new building, built in 1990)
Alexander Nevsky Cathedral (1864-1868)
Peter and Paul Church
Assumption Church (1843)
Nikolskaya Church (1750)
George
Church (1889)
House of Prayer for Evangelical Christian Baptists
(1993)
Former Kobrin prison (1821)
Former Kobrin synagogue
(XVIII century)
Gymnasium named after Maria Rodzevich (1910)
Monument to Suvorov
By train
You can get to Kobryn from Brest by diesel train. The
trains Brest - Vitebsk, Brest - Kommunary and Brest - Gomel also
stop in Kobryn.
By car
Highways M1 (Brest - Moscow), M10
(Kobrin - Gomel) and M12 (Kobryn - border of Ukraine (Mokrany) pass
through the city.
Since the time of the pre-war Polish linguist A. Bruckner, it has
been customary to associate the name of Kobrin with the Baltic Prussian
toponym Kobrun (the name of the forest, recorded under 1354), in
connection with the Lithuanian kauburys, kūbrys, Prussian kaubri "hill,
hill". The same root is present in the names of the rivers Kubra (basin
of the Narev River), Kobrina (near Kiev), Kubr (in the Moscow region),
which are associated with the Lithuanian kubrinti "go bending over".
Both meanings, toponymic and hydronymic, are united by the semantics of
unevenness, deviation.
Other versions of the origin of the name
were also voiced. According to the Belarusian geographer Vadim
Zhuchkevich, the name of the city came from the name of the disappeared
Obra people, who lived according to the annals in Western Polissya.
According to the Polish geographer Józef Staszewski, the name was formed
as a development of the Celtic name Kobrunus. The Soviet Slavist Oleg
Trubachev, denying the Celtic hypothesis, connected the origin of the
toponym with the result of adding the pronominal prefix k- with the Old
Slavonic stem -brnie (mud).
The coat of arms and the Flag were established by Decree of the
President of the Republic of Belarus on July 22, 2004 No. 340 and
registered in the State Heraldic Register of the Republic of Belarus No.
B-13 and B-14.
The emblem and the flag were approved by the
decision of the Kobrin District Council of Deputies dated December 4,
2002 No. 119.
Geography and transport
The city is located in
the west of Polissya on the flat banks of the Mukhavets River at its
junction with the Dnieper-Bug Canal, 41 km east of Brest. The area of
the city is 31.6 km². The length from north to south and from west to
east is about eight kilometers.
Kobrin is an important road
transport hub. Highways M1 (Brest-Moscow; part of the European route E30
and the pan-European transport corridor II Berlin-Nizhny Novgorod), M12
(Kobrin - the border of Ukraine [Mokrany]; part of the European route
E85), as well as the M10 highway (Kobrin-Gomel) pass through the city ,
which connects the regional centers of Polissya. In addition, the
republican roads P2 (part of the old Brest-Moscow road from Stolbtsy to
Kobrin) and P102 (Polish border-Vysokoye-Kamenets-Kobrin) pass through
the city.
The significance of the city in terms of rail transport
is not so great. Located on the line of the Polesye railways, the Kobrin
station is not a junction and is located 23 km from the Zhabinka
station, which is a railway junction (directions to Brest, Minsk and
Gomel).
City public transport is represented by buses (17 routes)
and fixed-route taxis. The service standard for urban transportation,
excluding buses of individual entrepreneurs, more than 1 bus per 2000
people, is overfulfilled by 16%.
There are three road bridges in
the city - in the center, in the western part, and in the eastern part,
as well as a railway bridge across the Mukhavets River.
According to the available data, it is impossible to determine the
date of foundation of the settlement that arose during the fortification
at the confluence of the Kobrinka River into the Mukhavets River. During
the study of the pit in 1999, archaeologist O.V. Iov found the remains
of ceramics of the 9th-10th centuries. Earlier, fragments of an old log
pavement were found in the city at a depth of 1.5-2 meters.
For
the first time the city of Kobrin (Kobryn) is mentioned in the spiritual
charter of the Volyn prince Vladimir Vasilkovich under 1287, in which he
bequeathed the city to his wife Olga Romanovna. From the time of the
first mention, the Kobrin land was in the possession of the Volyn
princes. From the first half of the 14th century, the city was part of
the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1404-1519, it was the center of the
specific Kobrin principality, which belonged to the princes of Kobrin, a
branch of the Gediminovich dynasty.
On the site of the original
settlement, wooden Upper and Lower Castles were built. The exact date of
their construction is unknown, according to the materials of the
revision of 1597, at that time they fell into disrepair. The upper
castle was surrounded by stone walls with multi-tiered wooden towers,
the lower one was surrounded by a moat and a rampart. The castles were
connected by a drawbridge. To our time, only the remains of the castle
moat have been preserved. Fragments of pottery dating back to the
12th-13th centuries were found on the surface of the earth.
To
the west of the castles, around 1497, the last prince of Kobrin built
the Spassky Monastery (one building has been preserved). The city was
built up from east to west parallel to Mukhavets. A wide floodplain of
the river divided it into two parts. According to the revision data of
1563, there were 5 streets on the left bank, the market square and the
town hall (not preserved), on the right - 2 streets. In 1540, on the
territory of Kobrin, the Bona Canal was laid - the first reclamation
object known in Belarus.
After the suppression of the clan of the
princes of Kobrin, the principality was transformed into a starostvo,
which in 1532 was attached to the Podlasie Voivodeship as a county,
since 1566 it was part of the Beresteysky Voivodeship.
In 1589,
the city received Magdeburg rights and a coat of arms - in a silver
field, the figures of the Virgin Mary and St. Anna (in honor of the
mistress of the city, Anna Jagiellonian), the Mother of God holds the
baby Jesus in her arms.
The city was badly damaged during the war
years of the mid-17th century. In September 1648, Cossack detachments
surrounded Kobryn and smashed the banner of the stolnik Vincent Korvin
Gonsevsky, almost the entire city was burned. In the middle of the 17th
century, the city had about 1700 inhabitants, 478 houses. In 1653 the
Swedes were here; but they did not devastate the city as much as the
Lithuanian-Polish army in 1662, who revolted due to non-payment of
salaries. In 1795 Kobrin was appointed a district town of the Lithuanian
province, in 1796 Slonim, 1802 Grodno. By the end of the 18th century,
the city was restored - in the 1790s it had 2160 inhabitants and 360
houses.
Since 1795, Kobrin was part of the Russian Empire, was
the center of the county of the same name as part of the Grodno
province. In the summer of 1812, Russian troops near Kobrin defeated a
detachment of the Napoleonic army; 548 out of 630 houses burned down in
the city. In 1897, 10,408 inhabitants lived in the city (of which 64.7%
were Jews; 15.6% were Ukrainians; 12.5% were Russians; 4.5% were Poles;
0, 8% - Belarusians), there were 30 enterprises.
In 1915 Kobrin
was occupied by German troops, and in 1919 it was occupied by the Polish
army. In 1921-1939, it was part of the Second Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, was the center of the povet as part of the Polessky
Voivodeship. In September 1939, it was occupied by Soviet troops, after
which it was included in the BSSR, since January 1940 - the center of
the region. In 1939, the city had 15.3 thousand inhabitants.
From
June 23, 1941 to July 20, 1944 it was occupied by German troops. The
Jews of Kobrin, who made up 70% of its inhabitants before the war, were
herded into the ghetto by the Nazis and killed by October 1942.
The post-war period saw the rapid development of the city, the
population is growing rapidly. In 1959, the city had 13.7 thousand
inhabitants, in 1970 - 24.9 thousand inhabitants.
On September
18-19, 2009, the Republican festival-fair of village workers
"Dozhinki-2009" was held in the city. To prepare for such a large-scale
event, about 400 billion rubles (about 144 million US dollars) were
allocated for the reconstruction of urban infrastructure and the
construction of new “dzhinochnye” facilities. 190 residential buildings,
7 schools, 126 km of streets were repaired, an 850-meter embankment, an
ice arena, a water park, a Palace of Culture, a rowing canal, an
amphitheater in Suvorov Park and other facilities were built. About 2
thousand builders from different cities of the country were employed in
the reconstruction of the city.
During the festival-fair, the
total length of the shopping malls was more than 7 km. More than 250
trade, public catering and consumer services offered their services. At
least 1200 people took part in sports events.
The life of the
city and the district is covered by the local TV channel "Kobrin
television" (KTV), the newspapers "Kobrynski Vesnik" and
"Kobrin-inform".
In 1817, the population of the city was 1427 people (899 of them were
Jews). By 1897, the population had risen to 10,365, and by 1907 it had
dropped to 8,754, primarily due to emigration to the United States and
other countries. In the first half of the 20th century, the population
practically did not grow and in 1956 amounted to approximately 11
thousand people. In the second half of the century, the rapid growth of
the city began, which continued until the 1990s (26,300 people in 1972,
49,400 people in 1991).
In 2008, the city's population was
50,900. According to the republican census of 2009, 51,166 people lived
in Kobrin, of which 23,755 (46.43%) were men and 27,411 (53.57%) were
women. By 2011, the population of the city had increased to 51,687
people, and by the beginning of 2018 it had exceeded 53,000 inhabitants.
In 2017, 634 people were born and 568 people died in Kobrin,
including 4 children under the age of 1 year. The birth rate is 11.9 per
1000 people (the average for the district is 12.1, for the Brest region
- 11.8, for the Republic of Belarus - 10.8), the death rate is 10.7 per
1000 people (the average for the district - 13.8, in the Brest region -
12.8, in the Republic of Belarus - 12.6).