Bobolice Castle

According to the chronicles of Jan of Czarnków and Jan Długosz, Bobolice was raised by King Casimir III the Great, probably on the site of an earlier wooden stronghold, as one of the Eagles' Nests — the chain of royal castles guarding the Kingdom of Poland's western border against Silesia. No document records the build itself, but the course of Casimir's reign points to the years 1350–1352. The castle crowned a limestone outcrop 360 metres up in the Polish Jura, its battlemented limestone walls reached by a drawbridge over a dry moat.

In 1370 Louis I of Hungary, on becoming King of Poland, granted Bobolice in fief to Władysław Opolczyk, Duke of Opole, as a prize for backing his dynastic plans. In 1379 the duke passed it to a Hungarian, Andrzej Schony de Barlabas, who took to styling himself Andrzej of Bobolice.

The gift rankled. At the assembly of Sieradz in 1383 the Polish nobility demanded that the future queen restore Bobolice, and the other castles Louis had given away, to the kingdom. Jadwiga took the throne at eleven and in 1386 married the Lithuanian grand duke crowned as Władysław II Jagiełło; around 1396, in the course of Jagiełło's war against the Duke of Opole, the pledge was made good. Andrzej's garrison of Germans and Czechs had meanwhile robbed the local inhabitants and conspired with the Teutonic Order, yet Andrzej himself weathered the conflict, having secured the king's favour in 1394 with the right to run his estates under German law. When he died in 1413, his family's male line ended with him.

The fifteenth century saw Bobolice split, pawned and fought over within a single family. Anna, Andrzej's daughter, carried the castle in her dowry to Stanisław Szafraniec; after his death in 1408 it was divided between her son and the children of her second marriage. In 1441 Andrzej of Wierzchowiska, a son of that second marriage, stormed the castle with thirty nobles and a hundred helpers and carried off his half-brother's grain and cattle. The feud ended only in 1445, when his side sold its half to Piotr Szafraniec of Pieskowa Skała for 700 grzywnas and two horses worth 100 each. In 1447 the castle passed to Andrzej Treska, who enlarged the living quarters — though the fortress still owed the Crown two foot soldiers in wartime, as recorded in 1456 — and in 1486 the Rzeszowski brothers sold it for 1,600 Hungarian florins to Mikołaj Kreza. Fifteenth-century chronicles tell of a Kreza lord who imprisoned his niece in the castle; she is said to haunt it still as a lady in white.

Around 1560 the Krezas rebuilt Bobolice as a family residence, stripping away much of its medieval character. In December 1587 the Habsburg archduke Maximilian III, rival to Sigismund III Vasa for the Polish throne, descended on the castle. Some accounts describe heavy devastation, but scholars doubt it: the owners surrendered, sparing the fabric, and in January 1588 the troops of hetman Jan Zamoyski retook it. Jan Kreza's debts then cost the family everything — in 1588 his creditors sold the estate to the archdeacon Stanisław Fogelweder, of a Swiss family from St Gallen, and the Fogelweders rebuilt the castle into a form it kept into the early nineteenth century.

Tradition holds that Swedish troops plundered and ruined Bobolice during the Deluge in 1657, the evidence usually cited being that King John III Sobieski, passing in 1683 on his way to Vienna, chose to sleep in a tent rather than in the castle. No surviving source confirms the destruction.

The castle descended through the Chodakowski and Męciński families, was sold to Tomasz Jarzyński in 1838 for 10,000 złotys, and in 1864 was bought with the surrounding estate by Antonina Gadomska for 97,500 roubles. In 1867 she granted the castle in perpetual lease to a local peasant couple, Tomasz and Marianna Baryła, and it stayed with their descendants: in 1932 the ruin was registered as a monument with Ignacy Baryła as owner, and in the 1990s a Polish court confirmed the family's title.

In 1996 the brothers Jarosław and Dariusz Lasecki bought the ruins from Wacław Baryła and, concluding that only full reconstruction could save the walls, began rebuilding in 2001 under a panel of Polish academics. Three years of excavation yielded ceramics, tiles, ironwork, glass and coins; the masons worked with washed river sand and lime slaked in pits for thirty years, in imitation of medieval mortar. The castle was roofed in autumn 2008 and opened to visitors on 3 September 2011.