Kreva Castle

The date Kreva Castle went up has never been settled. The classic account gives the building to Algirdas, after 1338 and before 1345, as his own residence. In the 1980s and 1990s a rival dating to the end of the 13th and the start of the 14th century gained ground, argued from the building technique and the character of the brick in the walls by the Belarusian archaeologists Michaś Tkachou, Aleh Trusaŭ and Ihar Charniaŭski; Yury Bokhan accepts that early start but has the work finished under Gediminas. The written sources point later still, to the 1370s and 1380s, and the Ukrainian archaeologist Siarhei Panyshka, reading Kreva against the masonry castles of Volhynia, argues for the second half of the 14th century, when Algirdas was already grand duke. Aleh Dziarnovich holds the traditional 1320s and 1330s to be the best founded of them.

Whenever it was raised, Kreva was among the first wholly masonry castles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, in lands that had until then no tradition of stone and brick building on that scale, and Hanseatic masters are thought to have had a hand in it. Not long after the castle was finished it was shot at with stone balls, later found by excavators against the western wall, and its fighting gallery burned.

Through the 14th century Kreva was one of the dynastic seats of the Gediminids, held by Algirdas and then by Jogaila, and it recurs in Jogaila's itineraries as a staging point and meeting place. In 1382, in the course of the Lithuanian Civil War of 1381–1384, Jogaila had his uncle Kęstutis, his rival for the grand-ducal throne, and Kęstutis's son Vytautas arrested and shut up in the castle, whose northern tower carried a cellar prison below four or more floors.

The Suprasl Chronicle is blunt about what followed: Kęstutis was put in irons, sent to Kreva and set in a tower, and on the fifth night Jogaila's chamberlains strangled him. Other accounts have him simply found dead a week after his arrest, with natural causes and murder still argued over. Vytautas, kept under close guard in a chamber, got out alive in the clothes of his wife's companion and fled to the Teutonic Order.

Three years after Kęstutis died there, the castle gave its name to a treaty. The terms of the Union of Krewo were worked out at Kreva in 1385 and signed in the castle: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland were joined under Grand Duke Jogaila, the first step towards the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In 1433 Švitrigaila, by then thrown off the grand-ducal throne, took Kreva; the chronicle entry says only that he seized the masonry castle and burned it.

Between 1503 and 1506 the Crimean Tatars besieged Kreva more than once and damaged it badly, though it was rebuilt quickly. In 1519 Muscovite commanders driving deep into the Grand Duchy took the place. In the second half of the century the castle housed the fugitive Russian prince Andrei Kurbsky, who was given the office of starosta of Kreva and held it until 1571.

The castle lost its defensive value by degrees and was still in good condition in the 18th century; by the 19th much of the walling had crumbled away. The First World War finished the work, since the front line between the Russian and German armies ran through Kreva and positional fighting went on there for more than three years. The castle lay inside German-held ground and was fitted with shelters and observation posts, and the shelling told hardest on the Princely Tower and the walls on the southern side. Only ruins came through, partially conserved in the 19th and 20th centuries and particularly in 1929, when Polish restorers under Stanisław Lorentz shored up what was left of the walls.

Archaeologists returned in 1970 under Michaś Tkachou, in 1985 with Aleh Trusaŭ, and in 1988 under Ihar Charniaŭski. Student volunteers conserved the entrance to the Kęstutis tower in 2004, and a charitable fund set up in 2005 ran summer camps and events at Kreva until the Grodno regional court ordered it wound up on 26 June 2023. In 2016 the government placed Kreva among 27 sites whose conservation could draw on the republican budget, and work restarted in the autumn of 2017.

Excavation by the fund and the Institute of History under Aleh Dziarnovich in 2018 and 2019 was followed by two finds: a 14th-century stepped passage inside the wall of the Small Tower in the summer of 2022, and in 2023 the foundations of a third tower, some two metres thick and shown on no earlier plan or description, which changed what was understood of the castle's shape. Dziarnovich, who led the dig, thinks that spot is probably where Švitrigaila's men broke into the castle in 1433; the tower was damaged and never rebuilt. By the early 2020s the Princely Tower and the north-western and north-eastern walls had been consolidated, and the south-western wall was being worked on in 2022. The fragments carry the status of a historical and cultural value of international significance, and since a gate was hung in 2022 the courtyard can be entered only by booking a tour with a guide from the museum at Smarhon.