Old Grodno Castle

The first wooden castle went up in the 11th century on a steep hill on the right bank of the Neman, where the Haradnichanka runs into it. The chronicles reach the Grodno princes in 1116, when Vladimir Monomakh married his daughter Ahafja to Vsevolodka, a great-grandson of Yaroslav the Wise; the settlement is first named as Horadzen in 1127, the year Mstislav of Kiev struck at Polatsk "by four roads" and counted "Vsevolodko from Horodno" among his contingents.

The earliest settlement on the hill burned; melted glass, mica and metal in the excavated layer point to a fire that took the whole of it, most likely during an enemy raid. Archaeologists traced a plinth-brick wall on the northern slope, once some 45 m long and at least 5 m high; 12th-century wood-and-stone defences of this kind are not found elsewhere in the Belarusian lands.

The last Grodno prince, Yuri Glebavich, died in 1241, and for almost twenty years the town was an arena of war between the Galician-Volhynian and the Lithuanian princes. From the mid-1240s Mindaugas and Erdzivil brought Horadzen into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Daniel Romanovich of Halych took it in 1253 and was fighting for it again in 1259; after his death in 1264 it passed to his son Shvarn, and in 1270, Volodymyr Vasylkovych of Volhynia being unable to hold it, to the Lithuanian prince Traidenis.

To strengthen his position Traidenis settled in Horadna and Slonim Prussians who had fled the crusaders. In 1274 he and the Grodno druzhina fell on Lev Danilovich's town of Drohiczyn and "slew all, small and great". The raid drew a savage answer: Lev asked the khan Mengu-Timur for help and was given an army under the voivode Yagurchin, with Bryansk, Smolensk, Pinsk and Turau drawn in. The campaign fell heavily on Horadna but broke up in quarrels among the allies short of its object. A second Galician-Volhynian attack came in 1277 under the princes Mstislav, Yuri and Vladimir. Warned by a deserter of disorder in the enemy camp, the defenders sent out the Prussian druzhina, which beat some and took others prisoner. When the southern princes stormed the place next day the garrison "stood like dead men on the ramparts of the town", and the attackers asked for peace and went away having achieved nothing against it.

Prussian chroniclers called the fortress Castle Garten, and among European knighthood it had the name of an impregnable place, a campaign against which counted as a point of honour for any Teuton; between the late 13th century and the early 15th, Grodno and its castles are reckoned to have withstood some twenty crusader attacks. David of Grodno is remembered as its defender.

Vytautas the Great rebuilt the castle in stone in 1391-98, adding five Brick Gothic towers and making it one of his main residences. Casimir IV Jagiellon kept court at Grodno alongside Vilnius: the Polish crown was offered to him here, and here he died in 1492.

Stephen Bathory meant Grodno to be a main residence of his eastern empire, and engaged Scotto of Parma to replace the Vytautas castle with a residence in the advanced Renaissance taste of northern Italy. Bathory died at Grodno in 1586 and the project was abandoned. Russian forces devastated the citadel in the Russo-Polish war of 1655.

The revival came in 1673-1678, when Krzysztof Zygmunt Pac raised the money to refurbish the royal residence; Michal Korybut Wisniowiecki chose the restored castle as the seat of every third Sejm of the Commonwealth. The Great Northern War did extensive damage and forced the royal court across to the New Grodno Castle, and after the partitions of Poland the castle went to the Russian army and housed a barracks.

The authorities of interwar Poland restored the Chamber of Ambassadors and the Sejm Hall. The castle now holds the Grodno state historical and archaeological museum, whose collection of more than 200,000 artefacts is one of the largest in Belarus, and the site is listed as cultural heritage of Belarus. The palace, fragments of the defensive walls, the bridge and the ruins of the Lower and Upper churches and of the princely chambers survive.

A further reconstruction began in 2017 and was criticised for lacking historical authenticity. A contemporary viewpoint was added near the central gates, and specialists disputing the project found significant errors in the documentation, which came of the constructor's inability to read the historical inventories written in Polish and German. Some authentic 16th-century walls were demolished.