Ogrodzieniec Castle

Fortification on Góra Zamkowa — Castle Mountain, at 515.5 metres the highest hill of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland — goes back to the reign of Bolesław III Wrymouth in the early 12th century, when a stronghold of earth and timber ramparts was raised there. It was probably destroyed in 1241 during the Mongol invasion.

Casimir the Great replaced it with a masonry castle in the middle of the 14th century and leased that castle for life to Przedbór of Brzezie, Marshal of the Kingdom, who spent a considerable sum on the fortifications. In 1387 Władysław Jagiełło granted the castle to Włodek of Charbinowice, cup-bearer of Kraków, and compensated Przedbór with 300 marks of Polish groschen charged on Dobczyce. Ogrodzieniec then passed to the Włodek family of the Sulima arms, who held it for close to a hundred years. The site did much of the defensive work itself: high rocks shielded three sides, a stone wall closed the circuit between them, and the only way in was a narrow cleft between two of the crags.

In 1470 the castle and its lands were bought from Jan-Bartosz of Ogrodzieniec by the Kraków bankers Imbram and Piotr Salomonowic. From them Ogrodzieniec went to Jan Feliks Rzeszowski, rector of Przemyśl and canon of Kraków; in 1492 Rzeszowski surrendered the castle to Jan II Pilecki against an unpaid debt, and in 1496 it descended to Pilecki's son Mikołaj.

Debt drove the next transfers too. In 1521 Mikołaj Pilecki pledged Ogrodzieniec and the surrounding estates to Mikołaj Chełmski, who in 1523 passed the pledge to Jan Boner, burgrave of Kraków. The castle came to Boner's nephew Seweryn, and between 1530 and 1545 Seweryn Boner rebuilt and extended the medieval gothic stronghold with a new wing, turning it into a Renaissance castle.

In 1562 the castle passed to Jan Firlej, Great Marshal of the Crown, through his marriage to Seweryn Boner's daughter Zofia. In 1587 it was taken by the troops of Archduke Maximilian, the rejected claimant to the Polish throne. In 1655 Swedish soldiers partly burnt the castle and then quartered themselves in it for nearly two years, wrecking much of the accommodation.

From 1669 Ogrodzieniec belonged to Stanisław Warszycki, castellan of Kraków, who rebuilt it between 1669 and 1680: he removed the attic parapets, converted defensive works into living rooms, threw earthen bastions around the castle, and in the outer bailey put up a stable, brewery, coach house, distillery, gate and walls laid out on a tenaille plan. Local folklore still gives Warszycki a role here — the Black Dog of Ogrodzieniec, said to be his soul, is seen prowling the ruins at night dragging a heavy chain.

After Warszycki's death the castle slid into ruin during the illness of his son Jan Kazimierz. About 1695 it passed to the Męciński family, and in 1702 half of it burned in a fire set by the troops of Charles XII of Sweden. It was never rebuilt.

About 1784 the ruin was bought from the Męcińskis by Tomasz Sariusz Jakliński, who let its condition go entirely; the last tenants walked out of the devastated castle around 1810. The next owner, Ludwik Kozłowski, treated the walls as a quarry for building material and sold off fittings from the castle to merchants. The last owners were the Wołczyński family, from a neighbouring hamlet. A chapel on the market square at Podzamcze was built from the castle's portal, volutes and cornice, and holds the vault keystone of the castle chapel, a Renaissance figure of Our Lady, and a round shot said to have fallen into the castle during the Swedish Deluge.

The ruins gave the whole region its name. In the 1880s the writer Adolf Dygasiński, taken with Ogrodzieniec, was probably the first to call it an 'eagle's nest', and the label spread to the belt of medieval castle ruins along the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland. After a visit to Ogrodzieniec in 1906, Aleksander Janowski founded the Polish Sightseeing Society, which put the outline of the ruins on its badge.

The castle was entered in the register of monuments in 1934 and again in 1967, and was nationalised after the Second World War. Conservation work to hold it as a permanent ruin and open it to the public ran from 1949 to 1973, and it is protected today as an immovable monument. The ruins are open to visitors as part of the Trail of the Eagles' Nests, the hiking route linking the castles of the region, and have drawn film crews from Iron Maiden in 1984 to Andrzej Wajda's The Revenge and Netflix's The Witcher.