Oscar Milosz was born in Čareja (Chereya), Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, now in modern-day Belarus, where he also spent his childhood. His father, Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz, was ethnically Lithuanian, nominally Catholic, and for a time an officer in the imperial Russian army. His mother, Marie Rosalie Rosenthal, was Jewish, the daughter of a Hebrew professor at the University of Warsaw. The family spoke Polish at home. Oscar was baptized a Catholic on 2 July 1886, at St. Alexander's Church in Warsaw. In 1889, when he was 12, his parents placed him at the Lycée Janson de Sailly in Paris. He began writing poems in 1894 and started to frequent artistic circles, meeting Oscar Wilde and Jean Moréas. After finishing at the Lycée, he enrolled at the École des langues orientales, where he studied Syriac and Hebrew.