Marijampole, the district center and largest city in Sūduva you can find at the Šešupė River on a site still covered in forest in the 16th century. The embryo of the city was the hamlet of Pašešupys, noted in Kaunas district tax registry in 1667. In 1717 the residents built a church. A Franciscan priest from Kaunas visited the church 3 times a year.

10 years later craftsmen and shopkeepers began to settle around the marketplace. Pašešupys became Starapolė. In 1750 countess Franciszka Buttlerowa, wife of the Prienai elder, invited the Marian Fathers to the area and built them a monastery.

The settlement formed around the monastery, called Marijampole, outshone Starapolė, and the site grew as a union of both settlements. It became a district center in 1808, and came to life in 1829 after constructing the Kaunas – Warsaw highway.

The city had several synagogues, including a Historicist style one built in 1870 that has survived to this day with its original facade intact, an Evangelic Lutheran church, and an Orthodox church which converted into the Catholic Church of St. Vincent de Paul after the First World War.