Kuressaare Castle

In 1228 Henry (VII) made a bishopric of Ösel-Wiek out of Läänemaa and the west Estonian islands. Most of Saaremaa belonged to it and the rest to the Teutonic Order, and the islanders' stiff resistance to Christianisation made a stronghold on the coast part of the crusader effort to hold the island.

How early the stone went up is disputed. The defence tower at the northern corner is usually taken for the oldest part, thirteenth-century, with the square convent building added later; other accounts have the Teutonic Order beginning the work only in the 1380s, on the bishops' behalf. The earliest written record of the castle dates from 1381, by which year the convent building was complete, and many of the bishops came to prefer Kuressaare to Haapsalu as their residence.

Firearms pushed the defences outward. Between the end of the fourteenth century and the start of the fifteenth a second enceinte was thrown around the thirteenth-century ring wall, 625 metres long and seven metres high; by mid-century it had been heightened and given cannon towers, the strongest of them, on the northern bastion, dating from the 1470s.

The castle stayed the bishops' residence until the Livonian War began in 1558, and in 1559 it passed to Denmark–Norway; Bishop Johannes V had sold it to the Danes with the rest of his holdings in Saaremaa and Courland. Heavier guns were making medieval stonework obsolete, and the Danes rebuilt accordingly, running thick earthen ramparts and bastions along the line of the old outer wall and cutting a moat some thirty metres wide that filled with sea water.

In the financial year 1618–19 the castle kept forty-seven officials and servants and fifty paid soldiers, thirty-six of them common infantry and eight armourers; by 1623 it mounted 116 guns. War multiplied that: when the fortress was handed to Sweden in 1645 under the Peace of Brömsebro, which ended the 1643–45 war between Sweden and Denmark–Norway, 850 mercenaries and 800 peasant militiamen were serving in it.

In 1648 the Swedish crown enfeoffed Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie with the county of Kuressaare and, on 16 September, with the castle itself. He planned a thorough rebuilding, but in 1654 Queen Christina abdicated and kept Saaremaa for herself as a source of income. Rebuilding came later in the century: the moat was widened and given three ravelins, and Erik Dahlbergh designed the Vauban-type fortress of bastions and ravelins whose lines are still largely intact. Swedish modernisation continued until 1706.

The Great Northern War carried Saaremaa into the Russian Empire. When the Russian garrison quit the fortress in 1711 it deliberately blew up much of the fortifications and of the castle, though some of the damage was afterwards made good.

As the empire's frontiers moved west the castle lost its strategic value. In 1836, once the fortress of Bomarsund had been built on Åland, the Russian garrison withdrew; that Kuressaare was not used by the armies who fought the Crimean War says the same thing. In the nineteenth century it served as a poorhouse, and from 1861 its bastions were laid out as a park under the Riga architect H. Göggingen.

Karl Rudolf Hermann Seuberlich and Wilhelm Neumann restored the buildings in 1904–12, fitting them out as the residence of the Saaremaa knighthood, from whom the county government formally took the castle and part of its contents on 22 September 1920. A second restoration followed in 1968 under Kalvi Aluve.

In 1941 occupying Soviet forces used the castle as a stronghold. Between July and September at least ninety people were executed in the yard. The arrests and the killings were carried out by the coastal defence special section and the military tribunal of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, working with the Saaremaa branch of the Estonian SSR's state security commissariat, the militia and the destruction battalion; those killed were civilians.

On 21 September 1941, immediately after the last Soviet units left Kuressaare, the yard was searched. On 25 September a communal grave holding thirty-one bodies was found under the floor of the powder cellar, the hands tied behind the back with barbed wire, the bodies thrown across one another with lime scattered between the layers. Ten graves in all, communal and single, were opened; the dead were identified, medically examined and then buried in the town cemetery or in their home cemeteries. The Nazi invasion and occupation that followed saw more than 300 killed on the castle grounds.