Zamek Pieniński

Historians and archaeologists date the castle to the second half of the 13th century. Jan Długosz has Duke Bolesław V the Chaste visiting it during the first Mongol invasion of 1241, but he was most likely describing another stronghold in the Pieniny. Research in the 1970s put the building work in the early 1280s; Daniel Gazda suggests a date either side of that, most likely before 1287. The undertaking is associated with Kinga, Duchess of Kraków, who began her reign holding 40,000 grzywnas — about 8.5 tonnes of silver — most of it spent rebuilding a Lesser Poland the Mongols had wrecked.

The castle was a refugium, occupied only when an invasion came: room for a hundred people and several dozen soldiers, and probably a bolt-hole for the Poor Clares of Stary Sącz. In the 1280s Polish strongholds were still mostly timber and earth — even Wawel had only wooden, earthen and stone curtains — and Pieniny is among the first in Poland, and probably the first in Lesser Poland, laid up in stone and mortar. That may suggest builders from the south, perhaps from Hungary, Kinga's homeland.

The first mention of the castle judged reliable comes from the 14th century, and it concerns the third Mongol invasion of Poland, led by Nogai Khan. It has Kinga withdrawing here in the opening days of December 1287 with her court, her priests and knights, and 70 Poor Clares, among them her sisters the princesses Yolanda and Constance. The Tatars made no attempt to storm the place. They shot at it to set it alight, then pulled back as a relief force approached from Hungary.

Legend tells the siege differently: a commander named Abu Bej, after the treasure the nuns were thought to manage, cut the small garrison down until the last knight fell to an arrow — whereupon the nuns' prayers brought a thick fog, and the Tatars, unable to see the castle, slid into the abyss.

After the invasion the stronghold disappears from the sources. The prevailing view is that it decayed through the 14th century into a local watchtower of little use, too far from the main trade routes and overshadowed by the larger Czorsztyn Castle, then being enlarged. Andrzej Skorupa held that it was destroyed in 1410 by the troops of Stibor of Stiboricz, sent by Sigismund of Luxembourg to help the Teutonic Order in its war with Poland and laying waste to the Sądecczyzna; a 19th-century source instead blames Hussite forces in 1431 or 1433. Neither date is secure, and the castle may afterwards have served as a base for the Hussites or for Matthias Corvinus's Hungarians in 1474.

Research carried out in 2020–2021 indicates it was still in use during the 15th century, and the Poor Clares were said to have sheltered here from plague as late as the 17th. The masonry is largely uniform: the castle was built in one campaign and never rebuilt.

The castle could not be made out from the valleys or from most of the surrounding hills, and rocky cliffs restricted the approach from east, south and west. The decisive factor in siting the curtain was probably a spring, which most likely already rose where the cistern was later sunk and watered the garrison. That curtain ran about 80 m between two rock outcrops and was originally some 160 cm thick; buildings were kept low and no high towers were raised, since a tower would have betrayed the position.

In the 17th and 18th centuries geographers cited the ruin as an example of an exceptionally well-defended castle, Laurence Echard among them in 1782. By the 19th century it drew pilgrims and diggers after treasure rumoured to lie somewhere on the site, and was sometimes mistaken for the remains of a convent of St Kinga. Szczęsny Morawski's Sądecczyzna of 1863 gave the first scholarly description.

Tomasz Szczygielski of the Pieniny Museum ran the first archaeological excavation in 1938–1939, uncovering the remains of a cistern along with aurochs bones, arrowheads and a spearhead. The outbreak of war stopped the work; Szczygielski died in Auschwitz, and the finds and much of the documentation were lost. Digging resumed after the war, and in 1976–1978 Maria Cabalska and Stanisław Kołodziejski traced the line of the walls and recovered a ceremonial bronze mace. The walls were consolidated in 2006–2007 and the ruins opened to walkers in 2009; after the gatehouse cellar vault collapsed in 2017 they were closed again, and in 2020–2021, alongside Daniel Gazda's Pieniny Archaeological Mission, the walls and vault were rebuilt with materials flown in by helicopter.