Lublin Castle

The hill beside Lublin's Old Town carried a wood-and-earth rampart in the 12th century, the seat of a castellan, and the first fortification there is credited to High Duke Casimir II the Just. During the 13th century a stone residential and defensive tower — a donjon — was raised inside the upper enclosure, its lower courses of broken limestone and its upper stages of brick. It is still the tallest building of the castle and the oldest standing building in the city.

Repeated raids by Lithuanians, Tatars and Ruthenians moved Casimir III the Great, in the first half of the 14th century, to replace the timber gród with a masonry castle: a gate to the west, a Gothic palace for the king, the Jewish tower and a circuit of defensive walls. The Chapel of the Holy Trinity, built as a royal chapel, probably belongs to the same campaign.

The castle stood on the royal road from Kraków to Vilnius, and under the Jagiellons it enjoyed royal favour and frequent stays by the family. In the first decades of the 15th century Władysław II Jagiełło commissioned a painted scheme for the castle chapel; the work was completed in 1418 by a Ruthenian master, Andrej, who signed one of the walls. The frescoes survive, and their mixing of Western and Eastern Orthodox manner has made the Chapel of the Holy Trinity a monument of international standing. The sons of Casimir IV Jagiellon were brought up in the castle under the tutelage of Jan Długosz.

About 1520 Sigismund the Old began turning the castle into a grand Renaissance royal residence, employing Italian masters brought from Kraków. A new gate with a tower went up, and the royal palace was heightened and crowned with attics; in December 1530, at the king's order, Seweryn Boner sent the architect Bartolommeo Berrecci to Lublin.

In 1569 the Sejm sat within the castle walls and signed the Union of Lublin, the founding act of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and the most momentous event in the castle's history. At the same Sejm, on 19 July 1569, Duke Albrecht Friedrich Hohenzollern of Prussia paid feudal homage to Sigismund II Augustus; Jan Kochanowski was present and described the ceremony in his poem Proporzec albo hołd pruski.

In 1648 King John Casimir directed the war from Lublin, and between 1655 and 1657 Swedish, Hungarian and Muscovite troops occupied the castle in turn, wrecking it; the building burned and collapsed, and only the chapel and the donjon came through intact. In 1743 the starosta Jakub Zamoyski put up new chancellery and archive buildings on the hill, and in 1773 the starosta Wincenty Potocki converted the old gatehouse into living quarters.

After the Congress of Vienna settlement of 1815 placed Lublin under Russian rule, the government of Congress Poland rebuilt the hill completely in the 1820s on the initiative of Stanisław Staszic and to a design by Jan Stompf. The new ranges were English neo-Gothic and their purpose was a criminal prison; only the keep and the chapel were left in their original state. The prison lasted 128 years: Tsarist from 1831 to 1915, holding participants in the fight for independence, among them the insurgents of 1863 and the writer Bolesław Prus; then, in independent Poland from 1918 to 1939, criminal prisoners alongside members of the outlawed Communist Party of Poland serving sentences for belonging to it.

Under the German occupation of 1939 to 1944 at least 40,000 inmates passed through the castle, and by some counts as many as 80,000, many of them members of the Polish resistance and Jews. The castle chapel was used as a German court. Prisoners were sent from Lublin to concentration camps, among them nearby Majdanek, and a large part of those held died in executions and in the camps. On 22 July 1944, just before withdrawing, the SS and German prison officers killed more than 300 of the prisoners still there.

From August 1944 the castle held a political prison answering first to the Soviet authorities and then to the communist government's Office of Public Security. About 35,000 Poles who fought the new government passed through it before 1954, especially the cursed soldiers; 333 died there, and of 515 death sentences handed down 180 were carried out. The prison was wound up on 13 January 1954 and its political prisoners moved to Chełm.

After repairs the castle was turned over to cultural use, and since 1957 it has been the main seat of the National Museum in Lublin, founded in 1906. The castle is listed as an immovable monument in Poland.