Czaplinek

Sister cities

• Grimmen
• Marlow
• Bad Schwartau

History

The oldest trace of a settlement dates back over 2,500 years; a palisade was once discovered on the island of Bielawa on Drawsko Lake, the second deepest lake in Poland, as well as in the village of Stare Drawsko. The area was initially inhabited by the Goths in the ancient times, In 1368 the town was purchased by King Casimir III the Great. For the next centuries Czaplinek remained a part of Poland, as a royal town, administratively in the Wałcz County in the Poznań Voivodeship in the Greater Poland Province. Czaplinek was granted various privileges by Polish kings in 1504, 1635 and 1640. In the 1658 Treaty of Bydgoszcz, it came under the control of Brandenburg-Prussia, and was definitively lost by Poland in 1668, although Poles made diplomatic efforts to regain the town until the First Partition of Poland in 1772, but to no avail. In the final stages of the war, on March 3, 1945, the Battle of Czaplinek took place, in which the First Polish Army defeated the forces of Nazi Germany and captured the town. Following Germany's defeat in 1945, Czaplinek, as part of historic Greater Poland, was finally reintegrated with Poland. The town's German population was expelled in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement. The remaining pre-war Polish inhabitants of the town, were joined by various other groups of Poles, the first of which were the just freed forced laborers and prisoners of war. The first post-war transport of several hundreds Poles came to Czaplinek on May 17, 1945 from Skierniewice, while the next transports came from former eastern Poland annexed by the Soviet Union, particularly from the Nowogródek and Wilno Voivodeships and the eastern part of the Białystok Voivodeship. After the war, the town's life was organized anew. Already in 1945, restaurants, cafes,…