Before 1426, a wooden hunting lodge was built for King Władysław Jagiełło on the Łutownia River, in the middle of the Białowieża Forest.

In the late 17th century, several small villages were started for development of local iron ore deposits and tar production.

The settlement and the royal hunting court were burnt down, and the residents who avoided infection moved to a new place.

To commemorate this event, a sandstone obelisk was erected near the palace, in which the names of the hunting entourage and the number of slaughtered animals were engraved in Polish and German.

Tsar Alexander I reintroduced the reserve in 1801 and hired a small amount of peasants for protection of the animals.

In 1895, an English-style palace park was created with an area of approximately 50 ha, designed by Walerian Kronenberg.

At that time, another park with an area of 20 ha was established in another part of Białowieża, also according to the design of Kronenberg, surrounding the seat of the Board of the Appanaged Forest.

Originally called a regiment, in the interwar period it received the name of the Directorate Park, which is preserved until today.

[1] During World War I most of the local Eastern Orthodox (different nationalities) population fled before the advancing German army which seized the area in August 1915.

On 1 September 1939, with the onset of World War II and joint German and Soviet attack on Poland, Luftwaffe bombed Bialowieza.

The bombs seriously damaged the church and, to a lesser extent, a military field hospital located in one of the wings of the palace.

In accordance with Ribentrop-Molotov Pact, the area came under Soviet occupation and was declared part of the Belastok Region of the Belarusian SSR.

After the war Białowieża was transferred back to the communist Polish People's Republic, yet again recovered and in 1947 became the center of the re-established National Park.

Nowadays it is one of the least populated areas in Poland, while at the same time it is one of the most important tourist attractions in the eastern part of the country with almost 100,000 visitors every year.

British historian Simon Schama devotes several chapters of his 1995 book Landscape and Memory to a consideration of the historical vicissitudes of the forests around Białowieża in an effort to explore the ways in which cultural imagination shapes humans' vision of the land.

[2] The local native dialect is described by linguists as being of Ruthenian origin, predominantly a mixture of Belarusian, Ukrainian with significant elements of Polish and a certain influence of the Russian language.

[2] Jewish community in Białowieża established in the late 19th century and shortly before World War I. M. Orlowicz reported that the synagogue was already in operation before 1914.