Ujazdów Castle

A stronghold at Jazdów, a settlement on the road leading to a crossing of the Vistula, belonged to the Dukes of Masovia by the 13th century. It was destroyed in a Lithuanian raid led by Ostafiy Konstantynowicz on 23 June 1262, and in 1281 Duke Bolesław II raided it again, then held by his brother Konrad II, seizing goods and captives. Late in the century Konrad II moved the ducal seat from Jazdów to the site of today's Royal Castle in Warsaw, and Jazdów fell into neglect.

In 1548 Queen Bona Sforza had a large wooden manor and farm buildings built nearby, and in the second half of the century Queen Anna Jagiellon, wife of Stefan Batory, built a new manor on the actual site of today's castle. It was there, on 12 January 1578, that Jan Kochanowski's blank-verse tragedy The Dismissal of the Greek Envoys received its premiere.

After 1624 Sigismund III Vasa began building a new brick residence on the ruins of the Mazovian dukes' stronghold, intended for his son, the future King Władysław IV — though there is little evidence the young prince, who spent much of his youth at his father's court, ever used it. It was an early Baroque palace, presumed to be the work of the architect Matteo Castelli, with two wings and corner towers. Adam Jarzębski's 1643 description of Warsaw records that its entrance was flanked by four marble lions. Between 1659 and 1665 the palace housed the mint of Titus Livius Boratini, who struck his copper boratynka coins there. It was plundered during the Swedish Deluge and afterwards ceased to serve as a royal residence.

In 1674 the palace was bought by Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski, and it was later leased to King Augustus II. Augustus commissioned a new royal residence on the site, built by the architect Tylman of Gameren incorporating much of the earlier construction, and had the surrounding gardens — later divided into two separate parks — refurbished; a canal below the palace was dug on his orders in 1717.

In 1764 King Stanisław August Poniatowski commissioned Jakub Fontana, Dominik Merlini, Jean-Baptiste Pillement and Efraim Schroeger to remodel the palace again, raising its façades by a floor and rebuilding the outbuildings to match. In 1784 the king donated the building to the Polish Army. Between 1784 and 1789 the architect Stanisław Zawadzki converted it into barracks for the Lithuanian Foot Guard Regiment and the 10th Foot Regiment; during the Kościuszko Uprising it served as the main conscription centre for the 20th Foot Regiment.

After the Partitions the castle stood empty during the Prussian occupation of Warsaw. Once the Duchy of Warsaw was proclaimed it was restored to the army, and from 1809 it housed the Ujazdów Hospital; plans to make it the Polish Army's Central Military Hospital were postponed when the Congress of Vienna placed Warsaw under Russian rule as Congress Poland. The hospital opened on 1 April 1818 with beds for a thousand wounded soldiers, and was enlarged to 1,250 beds after the November Uprising broke out.

After the uprising's defeat the Russian garrison in Warsaw was reinforced and the Polish units disbanded; a new central military hospital was built beside Ujazdów Park and the castle itself became more of a barracks for Russian troops. It served again as a Russian hospital on the outbreak of the First World War, was captured by the German army in 1915, and on 10 April 1917 was handed to the Polish Legions, becoming the main military hospital for Polish units.

After Poland regained independence in 1918 the interior was remodelled again, and from the 1920s the castle housed part of the Warsaw NCO school; its main staircase was restored to an eighteenth-century design, and on 15 May 1927 stone tablets were placed there naming Polish military medics who had died in the wars of 1797 to 1920. After the Polish Defensive War of 1939 the Red Cross ran a school there for wounded soldiers. Like much of Warsaw, the castle was burnt out and damaged by German forces following the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Plans to rebuild it as a Central Military House went unrealised, and in 1954 Poland's Communist authorities demolished its remaining walls. Reconstruction to the eighteenth-century design, drawn up by Piotr Biegański, began in 1975, and since 1985 the rebuilt castle has housed Warsaw's Centre for Contemporary Art. It is entered on Poland's register of historic monuments, a listing dating to 1959.