Klaipėda Castle

In 1252 Eberhard von Sayn, Grand Master of the Order, agreed with Heinrich, the Curonian bishop, to build a fortification at the mouth of the Danė River, and the Order raised a wooden castle there that same year, protected by a tower and standing on marshy ground; the Christians named it Memelburg. It quickly became a key outpost in the Order's war against the pagan Lithuanians, who were allied with the Samogitians. A stone castle replaced it in 1253, probably because the low-lying ground on which the first castle stood had presented problems.

The castle was attacked repeatedly over the following century, in 1257, 1263, 1307, and in the Battle of Klaipėda of 1323, then again in 1360 and twice in 1379, when it was burned down on both occasions. Rebuilt with four towers after 1360, it held a prison in one of them from 1438. A new defensive tower raised in 1393 was destroyed by a Lithuanian raid within the same year, and the castle was attacked again in 1402 and 1409. After the Teutonic Order's defeat at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410, the castle kept its strategic importance, because Lithuania and the Order could not agree where the border between them should run and both claimed Klaipėda as their own.

After the Peace of Melno in 1422, major fortification work was completed by 1441, giving the castle a roughly square plan with a northern wall some 102 metres long and up to 11 metres high, and two 12-metre cylindrical corner towers — the Great Powder Tower and the Prince's Tower — built to withstand contemporary artillery. During the Thirteen Years' War the castle was taken by the army of the Kingdom of Poland in 1454 and by the Samogitians in 1455.

Early in the 16th century the castle was strengthened with earthen ramparts and bastions, built between 1516 and 1519; it was attacked by Danzig warships and the Samogitians in 1520 and reinforced with cannon in 1524. After the Duchy of Prussia was formed in 1525, the castle was rebuilt from its foundations by the mid-16th century — French engineers carried out an upgrade between 1529 and 1559 that gave it five towers around the main building, including a main tower probably six storeys high. Early in the 17th century it was ringed by Dutch-style bastions named for Prussian princes.

Sweden looted and damaged the castle in 1629, and fire damaged it further in 1660 and 1669; a commandant's house was built on the Prince Karl bastion in 1670, and when Swedish forces attacked again in 1678 the town burned but the castle itself went untouched. It sustained severe damage in 1757, during a war with Russia — Russian troops took Klaipėda after a battle fought between 30 June and 5 July that year. The castle's last known reconstruction took place in 1763, the year Russian forces withdrew and it was abandoned to gradual decay.

From 1812, during the French period, the castle held barracks, an arsenal, stores and a hospital. By 1821 only two of its five towers still stood; the entrance vaults began collapsing in 1840, the ruins of the Great Powder Tower were cleared away in 1843, and the Prince's Tower fell in around 1865, prompting construction of a new fort on the Kopgalis spit that same year. Its parts and materials were dismantled and sold off by the local authorities; the last remaining buildings were demolished between 1872 and 1874.

Bunkers were dug into the castle's eastern rampart during the Second World War, and after 1945 the site was occupied by successive Soviet-era ship-repair enterprises, the last of which left the grounds in 2009. A major excavation in 1968, led by archaeologist Adolfas Tautavičius, uncovered the cultural layer of the former Teutonic castle, and excavation work has continued there since 1975.

A museum opened on 1 August 2002, marking the city's 750th anniversary, inside the restored Prince Friedrich postern beneath one of the bastions, a chamber that had stored artillery in the 17th century; visitors can see excavated remains and foundations, including a stretch of Klaipėda's oldest surviving street paving, laid in the 16th century. The museum reopened after restoration in 2021, partial reconstruction of the castle began in 2023, and its tower was rebuilt by the summer of 2025 at a cost of around 4 million euros. Run today as a branch of the Lithuania Minor History Museum, the site hosts the annual Klaipėda Castle Jazz Festival, and the city marks its 1252 founding with public events on the grounds every 1 August.