Trakai Island Castle

Before any wall went up, the site was not one island but three small islets with boggy ground between them, and those conditions shaped the plan that followed. In the second half of the fourteenth century Grand Duke Kęstutis ordered a stone castle raised on the largest of them, the work bound up with the strengthening of the Trakai Peninsula Castle. It had two baileys and a semi-enclosed residential palace whose walls rose only to about the second-floor window sills, with no keep yet and the bailey wall and moat barely begun. Kęstutis moved his main residence and his treasury out to the island. The castle burned while still under construction, and in 1377 an attack by the Teutonic knights left it badly devastated.

After the assassination of Kęstutis, Jogaila and Vytautas the Great fought for the title of Grand Duke of Lithuania, and the island castle was besieged by both sides. Soon after their reconciliation the second building phase began, running until 1409 and counting as the major development in the castle's history. During the truce with the Teutonic Order the works were apparently supervised by the Order's own stonemason, Radike — four years before the two sides met at Grunwald.

Two wings were added, and on the southern side a six-storey keep of 35 metres whose movable gates separated the palace from the rest of the castle; besides its defensive work it held a chapel and living quarters, and it linked to the multi-storey Ducal Palace. The Ducal Hall took the entire southern wing, some 21 metres long, a room whose proportions only the Upper Palace of the Vilnius Castle Complex could surpass. The builders worked in red Gothic brick, keeping stone blocks for the foundations and the upper parts of walls and towers.

The expansion of the early fifteenth century thickened the walls to 2.5 metres and raised them with additional firing galleries. Three major defensive towers went up on the corners, the south-western one also serving as a prison, their top storeys given over to soldiers and a large number of cannons. Lake Galvė then stood several metres higher than today, and the builders used the extra water to separate the Ducal Palace from the rest of the castle with a moat just wide enough for small boats, crossed by gates that could be raised if an enemy came.

The castle lost its military importance soon after the Battle of Grunwald, where the Grand Duchy's chief enemy was defeated by the Polish-Lithuanian army, and it became a residence: newly decorated within, painted with frescos that survive in part, and used to receive foreign emissaries. Jogaila visited thirteen times between 1413 and 1430. The Flemish traveller Guillebert de Lannoy saw it in 1414 and wrote that "the old castle stands on one side of the lake, in open ground, the other one stands in the middle of a second lake, and is within a cannon shot of the old one. It is completely new, built from bricks following French pattern."

Vytautas the Great died in the castle on 27 October 1430, without being crowned King of Lithuania. Under Sigismund Augustus it was redecorated in Renaissance style and served briefly as a royal summer residence; the Lithuanian Metrica was kept here until 1511, and later the castle was used as a prison. The wars with Muscovy did the lasting damage: the fighting of 1655–1660 left it broken and long unattended, never reconstructed, and the ruins decayed.

Reconstruction plans were drawn up in the nineteenth century, and the surviving wall paintings were redrawn in 1822 and copied again in 1933. The Imperial Archaeological Commission began documenting what remained in 1888, and German specialists made attempts of their own during the First World War. Between 1935 and 1941 Lithuanian and Polish preservationists strengthened parts of the Ducal Palace walls and rebuilt the south-eastern tower, until the intensifying war stopped the work. The finds from the excavations of 1929–1939 — imported and local pottery, chess pieces, stove tiles, coins — were destroyed during the Nazi occupation.

A major reconstruction project was begun in 1946, with active work from 1951–1952 and the greater part finished in 1961, the castle rebuilt in fifteenth-century style to a design by B. Krūminis and other architects. It was a Lithuanian initiative, and it met resistance from Soviet authorities. The Trakai History Museum was established in the restored palace in 1962.