Sokółka

Sokółka began as a royal village on the road between Knyszyn and Grodno. Its place on that route helped it grow into a town, and King Sigismund III Vasa granted it municipal rights in 1609. The layout around its central square is associated with Antoni Tyzenhauz, the administrator whose reforms reshaped several royal estates in the eighteenth century. Sokółka passed to Prussia in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, then to Russia in 1807. Its market square preserves the outline of a small town formed under the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.