The area where the town of Ełk is located was originally inhabited by Jatvingians, a Baltic peoples, during the Early Middle Ages.

After the outbreak of the Thirteen Years' War in 1454, the town sided with the Prussian Confederation,[3][need quotation to verify] at whose request the Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon announced the incorporation of the region into the Kingdom of Poland, which resulted in the town becoming part of the Polish state.

[citation needed] From 1896 to 1902, "Gazeta Ludowa", a Polish-language newspaper, heavily subsidised by banks from Greater Poland[28][29] representing the Polish national movement in Masuria, was published in the city.

[30] It soon faced repression and discrimination from the German authorities which led to its demise;[31] its paid circulation dropped from 357 copies in 1896 to less than 250 at the turn-of-the-century.

[32] According to German-American author, Richard Blanke, the "demise marked the end of the second major effort by Polish nationalists to establish a journalistic foothold in Masuria".

The co-founder of the party was poet Michał Kajka, today honoured in Ełk with a monument in the centre of the city.

[38] Many citizens fled during World War I, when Imperial Russian troops attacked the region, but returned after the battles of Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes.

The Germans vandalized Polish information boards[40] and held an anti-Polish rally at which they encouraged the beating of Poles and the devastation of their homes and property.

[44] It was in Lyck that the first-ever weekly newspaper in the Hebrew language, Ha-Magid ("the preacher") was founded in 1856 by Eliezer Lipmann Silbermann, a local rabbi.

[47] The wave of anti-Semitic repressions intensified after Nazis gained power in Germany in 1933 and many local merchants and intellectuals of Jewish descent were arrested.

The city was placed under Polish administration in April 1945 and the remaining German inhabitants were expelled in accordance with the Potsdam Agreement.

[citation needed] In 2017, the anti-Muslim Ełk riots occurred after a fatal stabbing of a 21-year-old man by a Muslim kebab cook.

Several hundred men surrounded the Prince Kebab restaurant,[52][53] tossing firecrackers, stones, and Molotov cocktails at the shop.

Since the medieval Christianization of the region, the city's population was Roman Catholic, and after the Reformation, it was almost entirely Lutheran until World War II.

After the war, the main religion in Ełk became again Roman Catholicism, although a number of Protestant churches are also represented and play an important role in the religious life of the population.

[65] The current coat of arms of Ełk were adopted in 1999, after the town was visited by the Pope John Paul II.