Biržai Castle

Krzysztof "Piorun" Radziwiłł began the work in 1575 not with walls but with water, throwing a dam across the Apaščia and Agluona rivers at their confluence to fill the artificial Lake Širvėna. Construction of the earth bastion castle itself started in 1586, and between 1586 and 1589 the embankments were poured. Within them rose a stately manor house, an Evangelical Reformed church, an arsenal and food storehouses, barracks and other buildings; fortress and town were laid out as one integrated defensive complex. Construction was completed in 1589.

Radziwiłł built to protect his lands and the northern Lithuanian border with Livonia, and he built against artillery. Sharp-angled bastions were set at all four corners of the courtyard, the earth ramparts three to five metres high and faced on the outer side with brick and stone, the whole circuit 900 metres long. It was the first Italian-style bastion fort in Lithuania and one of the first in north-eastern Europe.

Sigismund III Vasa, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, and his descendants after him would not give up their claim to the Swedish throne, and the wars that followed brought Gustav II Adolf to Biržai in person. On 7 August 1625 the castle was besieged by about 8,000 Swedish troops under the king's own command. After a second assault on 7 September the garrison surrendered and the stronghold was destroyed; the Swedes took sixty cannon away with them. A treaty concluded with the Swedish king in January 1627 returned Biržai to the Radvilas.

In 1637 Duke Krzysztof II Radziwiłł began a rebuilding that changed the fortress's whole system of defence, replacing the Italian pattern with the Dutch. The architect Georgas Pirkas began recasting the embankments on the Netherlandish model, and a new manor house was built. In 1640 Biržai passed to Krzysztof's son Janusz, the future Grand Hetman of Lithuania, who carried the reconstruction on; under him a rampart five to seven metres high and some nineteen metres wide rose behind a ditch four to seven metres deep.

It was still unfinished when the war came back. Under the agreement the Radvilas made with the Swedes at Riga on 10 August 1655 the half-rebuilt castle passed into Swedish hands. On 24 January 1657 its Swedish garrison of 190 men surrendered to the army of Vincentas Gosievskis, field hetman of Lithuania, whose troops wrecked the castle and burned the town. Bogusław Radziwiłł's dragoons retook it on 20 August 1659, and between 1659 and 1669 the ramparts and the dam were repaired and a new manor house, barracks, arsenal and gate tower built to the designs of the architect Teofilis Krell-Spinovskis with the engineer Samuelis Arciševskis. Bogusław died in 1669, the last male descendant of the Biržai-Dubingiai branch of the Radvilas, and willed all his property to his daughter Ludwika Karolina.

Reconstruction of the fortress resumed in 1671 and lasted until 1682, and the rebuilt stronghold was much larger than the first, covering thirteen hectares. On 26 February 1701, during the Great Northern War, Augustus II the Strong, ruler of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Elector of Saxony, and Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, signed the anti-Swedish Treaty of Biržai in the castle. On 14 September 1704 the army of the Swedish general Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt took the fortress back, and the Swedes blew up the palace and the other buildings of the stronghold as they withdrew.

Biržai Castle passed to the Tyszkiewicz family in 1811, and in 1822 the Emperor Alexander I of Russia ordered the preservation of its remains. A garden was planted in the courtyard at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and in 1931 Juozas Zikaras's sculpted bust of Jonušas Radvila was set up there. The defensive system of ramparts and water ditches survived; the remains of the manor house were conserved between 1955 and 1962.

The castle was reconstructed from ruins between 1978 and 1986 in Renaissance-Baroque style, its central block and western wall to the designs of the architect Evaldas Purlys, and the bridge over the ditch was rebuilt in 1970 and again in 2001 to a design by Napalys Kitkauskas. The Biržai region museum "Sėla", founded in 1928, opened in the palace in 1989 and shares it with the town library and a restaurant. Several years of archaeological excavation preceded the rebuilding of the arsenal between 2011 and 2013, which was fitted out with an exhibition of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century warfare.