About Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad (formerly Konigsberg) is a seaport city, capital and main city of the Kaliningrad Oblast, a small Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania with access to the Baltic Sea. Kaliningrad lies on the Pregolya River near its mouth on the Vislinski Zalev, which empties into the Gulf of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea.
The city was founded (1255) as a fortress of the Teutonic Knights by King Ottocar II of Bohemia, for whom it is supposedly named. It was the residence of the dukes of Prussia from 1525 until the union (1618) of Prussia and Brandenburg and became (1701) the coronation city of the kings of Prussia. As part of the northern section of East Prussia, the city was transferred to the USSR in 1945. The new Soviet city (named Kaliningrad for Mikhail Kalinin in 1946) was laid out after 1945 in the former residential suburbs of Konigsberg; its population is almost entirely Russian.
