Lesko

Lesko is a small town in the Bieszczady mountains of south-eastern Poland, in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship, and since 2002 the seat of Lesko County. It stands in the Doly district of rolling hills at an average height of about 390 metres above sea level, and was known as Lisko until 1926. Its population was 5,755 at the 2009 count. Historians think the town was founded in the fourteenth century; written records first mention it in 1436 and it received its town charter around 1469 under the Kmita family. In the seventeenth century it was a notable trading and craft centre until Swedish troops looted it in 1704. It passed to the Austrian Empire in 1772 and returned to Poland in 1918, and its large Jewish community was destroyed in the Holocaust. Today it serves as a gateway to the Bieszczady Mountains, with a castle, a baroque parish church and a restored synagogue.