Supernovae are the result of explosions which terminate the life of massive stars. The amount of energy released by the supernovae in our galaxy is so large that these explosions provide the dominant energy for the heating of the hot (T ≳ 106 K) IS component and for the kinetic energy of the large scale motions of the interstellar clouds. In addition, the ejected matter of supernovae is the main source of the chemical pollution of the IS medium. In this review I describe the different types of supernovae and their frequency in our galaxy in Section II. The observations of supernova remnants are briefly described in Section III. The evolution of the remnants is discussed in Section IV. In Section V I discuss the effect of supernovae when they occur in stellar clusters. In Section VI the overall effect of stellar winds and supernovae on the interstellar medium is described.