Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in a Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000. Half of the population were Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after the cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire. As the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II.