Königsberg Castle

North of the island of Kneiphof, where two arms of the Pregel met, a rounded hilltop rose some twenty metres above the valley. The Prussians called it Twangste and used it as a refuge and as the place where the villages around held their assemblies and their sacrifices. At the turn of 1254 and 1255 a crusading force gathered under Poppo von Osterna, grand master of the Teutonic Order, its most eminent members the margrave Otto III of Brandenburg and his brother-in-law Ottokar, king of Bohemia, who is credited with founding the castle; order and king chose Twangste as the point from which to hold conquered Sambia.

The first fort, laid out in January 1255 under Burkhard von Hornhausen as commander, was of timber and earthworks; two years later work began on an Ordensburg of brick and stone. Through the 13th century the place was attacked repeatedly by Prussians in revolt and by Lithuanian raiding parties. When the grand master moved his seat to Marienburg in 1309, Königsberg became the residence of the order's marshal, and in the 14th century the castle was the mustering point for campaigns into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The town that grew beneath the walls took its name.

The main works formed a long rectangle running west to east across the plateau of the hill, defended by a double ring of stone walls with a parcham between them — the passage doubling as the burial ground of the knight-brothers — and carrying nine projecting towers and four corner towers, of which only the octagonal Haberturm lasted into modern times. The Schlossturm that crowned the whole went up at the end of the 14th century. When the marshal took up residence after 1309, a house for him and his clerks was raised over the great cellars, cellars that later held the Blutgericht, the wine tavern named after the medieval criminal court. The grand master moved into the same block in 1457; in the Prussian centuries it housed the high court, the budget ministry, the chamber of war and state domains, and the state archive.

From 1457 to 1525 the castle was the residence of the grand master of the Teutonic Order. In 1525 Albrecht of Brandenburg secularised the order's Prussian lands and it passed to the duke of Prussia. Its occupants thereafter were sovereigns rather than commanders: Władysław IV Vasa of Poland stayed here in 1635 as suzerain of Ducal Prussia; in January 1656 Charles X Gustav of Sweden and the elector Friedrich Wilhelm signed their alliance within these walls; in 1697 the elector Friedrich III received Peter I's Grand Embassy; and Stanisław Leszczyński lodged here from 1734 to 1736 during the War of the Polish Succession.

By then the building had lost its defensive function, but the Schlosskirche in the west wing, its walls and columns emblazoned with the arms of the Order of the Black Eagle, still saw two coronations: Frederick I as the first Prussian king in 1701, and in 1861 William I, later the first German emperor.

Above the palace church ran the Hall of Muscovites, some 83 metres long and 18 across, its span carried without a single pillar. A description of 1815 records a library beside the hall and a tower of 100 metres with 284 steps to the top; rebuilt in Gothic style in 1864–1866, the tower stood 84.5 metres. Twice a day a chorale sounded from it, at eleven in the morning and again at nine at night.

The Prussian Museum opened in the castle in 1844, and by the 20th century the north wing's Prussia collection held 240,000 exhibits, alongside holdings of the Königsberg state and university library and paintings by Lovis Corinth. The Hohenzollern apartments and the museum were open daily until the later part of the Second World War. Below, the Blutgericht sold wine, and a figure of Hans von Sagan turned as the castle's weathervane.

After 1933 the National Socialist leadership made heavy use of the castle as a symbol of the Prussian spirit; Hitler inspected it on 9 May 1933 and again on 18 March 1936 during a Reichstag election campaign, and the party's election staff sat here on 29 March, waiting for returns that gave the NSDAP list 99.8 per cent in the province. The Amber Room, stripped from the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo in 1941, was installed in one of the halls from 1942, and its traces were lost in 1945.

British bombing on the night of 29–30 August 1944 reduced the castle to a burned-out shell, but the thick outer walls held — through the raid, and through the Soviet artillery of the three-month siege that ended with the Battle of Königsberg in April 1945. The city became Kaliningrad in 1946. The main tower, by then unsafe, was blown up in 1953, and parts of the walls and towers still stood in ruin in 1956, until Nikolai Konovalov, first secretary of the regional party committee, ordered the remains blown up in 1967, the last of them cleared the following year. The wish to raise a wholly Soviet city on the site of the old German one is now taken as the reason; in 1969 the crown of the hill itself was cut away by several metres.

The House of Soviets, begun in 1970 over the castle's south-eastern range, sank into ground made unsound by the collapse of the castle's underground levels, stood unfinished for decades and was demolished in August 2024. Excavation of the cellars ran from 1993 to 2007, financed from 2001 by the magazine Der Spiegel, and turned up thousands of objects — among them an occult silver casket of medals and amulets found in June 2005 — but not the Amber Room. Rebuilding the castle from nothing proved too great a task, so the plans were dropped and the central square cobbled over; in 2022 the exposed ruins were stabilised with bentonite matting and buried under sand.