Dieveniškės (in Lithuanian literally: Place of gods; ; Dzevyanishki) is škėa town in the Vilnius County of Lithuania, about from the Belarusian border in the so-called Dieveniškės appendix. It is surrounded by the Dieveniškės Regional Park.
History
The estate of Dieveniškės was first mentioned in 1385 as a village of a Lithuanian noble Mykolas Mingaila, possibly the son of Gedgaudas, later ruled by the Goštautai family. Stanislovas Goštautas visited Dieveniškės with his wife Barbara Radziwill (), who used to pray in Dieveniškės church, built in the 16th century. According to the 1897 census, 75% of the village population was Jewish, and the town had two synagogues. The Jewish population was murdered during the Holocaust in Lithuania.
The people living in the Dieveniškės were ethnically mixed (Lithuanian, Polish, Belarusian), when the region was assigned to Belarus post-1939. Belarus gave the area voluntarily to Lithuania in 1940. As the result, Dieveniškės becomes a 207-square-kilometre Lithuanian salient surrounded by and projecting some 30 kilometres into the Belarusian territory. At its neck, the “Lithuanian appendix” is barely 3 kilometres wide. According to 1989 census, slightly over 60 percent of residents considered themselves Polish.
References
Towns in Lithuania
Towns in Vilnius County
Oshmyansky Uyezd
Šalčininkai District Municipality
Wilno Voivodeship (1926–1939) Holocaust locations in Lithuania Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust