Map - Kodeń

Kodeń is a village in eastern Poland on the Bug River, which forms the border between Poland and Belarus. Administratively, it belongs to Biała Podlaska County in Lublin Voivodeship. It is the seat of the gmina (administrative district) called Gmina Kodeń. It has approximately 1,900 inhabitants (as at 2006). It lies approximately 37 km south-east of Biała Podlaska and 102 km north-east of the regional capital Lublin. The village is the site of a famous Marian shrine.

The first written mention comes from the 16th century, stating a settlement existed at the same site a century earlier. The settlement was purchased by Jan Sapieha, who fortified it and in 1511 established a town of Magdeburg law. In 1513, Jan Sapieha became voivode of the new founded Lithuanian voivodeship of Podlaskie. In 1569, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania merged with Poland by the Union of Lublin, and by the Union of Brest of 1596, the Orthodox church of Lithuania acknowledged the authority of the pope, that way becoming “Uniate” or Greek Catholic.

With the Third Partition of Poland in 1793, Kodeń came under Austrian rule. During Napoleon's French hegemony, it became part of the Duchy of Warsaw. That way, by the decisions of the Congress of Vienna, it was a place in Congress Poland since 1815, under Russian rule for first in personal union, after 1831 as a part of Russia. In 1869 the town was stripped of its city rights.

After the end of World War I, it lay in the disputed area between the establishing Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic, proclaimed in January 1918, but also claimed by Soviet Russia. With the Peace of Riga in 1921, Kodeń definitively became part of the Polish Republic. During German occupation in World War II, it lay in the General Government. Most of the Jewish population in Kodeń (pronounced "KUD-na" by the Jewish people) was wiped out by the Nazi's in WWII, the Jewish cemeteries were used to create roads for Nazi vehicles.