Włodawa (Polish pronunciation: [vwɔˈdava]) is a town in eastern Poland on the Bug River, close to the borders with Belarus and Ukraine.

The first written mention of the town in an Old Slavonic chronicle which speaks about Prince Daniel staying there, escaping from the Tartars in 1241.

In 1475 Michał and Aleksander Sanguszko received the town in exchange with the Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon.

[4] The location on the large river, Bug, favored the rapid development of the city as a commercial and transit center.

[7] Under German occupation, Włodawa was the location of a subcamp of the Stalag 319 prisoner-of-war camp for Allied POWs.

The census of 1773 records Jewish physicians, butchers, millers, barbers, goldsmiths, tailors, furriers, merchants, and carters, in addition to one Jew in each of the trades of coppersmith, cobbler, glazier, chandler, and wheelwright.

In the late 19th century Włodawa had a Jewish-owned steam-powered flour mill, tannery and soap factory.

Round ups for the Holocaust transports to the nearby Sobibór extermination camp took place in waves: 1,300 Jews in May 1942, 5,400 in October, 2,800 in November 1942, and 2,000 in April 1943, as well as the last 150 in May 1943.

Several Jews from Adampol and the Włodawa Ghetto were able to escape, and joined the Parczew partisans in the forests, fighting actively against the Nazis with Soviet assistance and weapons.

The Jewish cemetery was demolished by the Germans who used the headstones as road building material, and turned the Synagogue into military storage.

No Jews are known to live in the town today, although the handsome, Baroque, Wlodawa Synagogue serves as major tourist attraction.

In the 1700s, while some Amish families traveled west from Germany and Switzerland in their quest for religious freedom to the colony of Pennsylvania, others would venture to Central and Eastern Europe, largely as a part of the Josephine colonization.

Jerold A. Stahly writes of this community in the vicinity of Włodawa in his work "Mennonite and Amish Identities Among the Swiss Volhynians in Europe": "In the Lithuanian congregation in Urszulin and Michelsdorf in the Włodawa district, one preacher was Christian Graber, ordained in 1790 in Montbeliard to go to Poland.

When Austria took control of the Włodawa district in 1795 as part of West Galicia, there was no longer an international border separating the Amish Mennonites in Lemberger and Littauer congregations.

Joseph Mündlein apparently moved to the Włodawa District, where he served as an elder, performing a marriage in 1802.

He described wives being very careful to avoid a friendly laugh or looking other men in the eye, for fear of being put under a ban for many weeks, so that no Mennonite would speak to her and her husband could not even sit at a table with her."

[15][16] The town is represented by the local football club MLKS Włodawianka Włodawa who compete in the lower leagues.