Trenčín Castle

A rock inscription on the crag records a victory won there in AD 179 by the Second Roman Legion at Laugaricio, the Latin name for Trenčín. The oldest building on the hill is a stone rotunda, probably raised in the Great Moravian period; the site may have begun as a fortified hillfort before any stone castle stood there.

In the mid-thirteenth century the castle was held by Baron Jakab Cseszneky, swordbearer to King Béla IV. In the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it passed to Matthew III Csák, the oligarch later remembered as the legendary 'Lord of the river Váh and the Tatra Mountains'. Csák enlarged an eleventh-century residential tower and added a palace within a massive new fortification; the tower, still called the Matúš Tower, remains the dominant feature of the castle's skyline.

In 1335 the Treaty of Trenčín was concluded at the castle between King Casimir III of Poland, King Charles I of Hungary and King John of Bohemia. John of Bohemia attended the negotiations in person with his son Charles, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, as did Charles I of Hungary; Casimir III of Poland was represented by deputies.

After Csák's death the castle belonged to the Hungarian crown until the close of the fifteenth century. King Louis of Anjou enlarged the upper castle with a new palace and fortification, and Sigismund of Luxembourg gave the castle to his wife Barbara, for whom a new palace and chapel were built in the first third of the fifteenth century. Further strengthening of the fortifications followed later in the fifteenth century, prompted by Hussite raids reaching into Slovakia.

At the end of the fifteenth century Štefan Zápoľský acquired the castle together with the town and began extensive rebuilding. The castle was already a target of Turkish expansion by the early sixteenth century. Despite Zápoľský's fortification work, it was taken in 1527 by Katzianer, a general of King Ferdinand I.

Between 1540 and 1560 the fortifications were restored and expanded to designs by Italian architects, adding a star-shaped artillery defence and modernising the buildings; the high Gothic roofs gave way to horizontal Renaissance attics with swallow-tail battlements. The rebuilding left Trenčín, alongside Spiš Castle and Devín Castle, counted among the most extensive castles in Europe.

Within the lower castle precincts a deep well is known as the Well of Love, after a legend that a Turkish prince named Omar dug it to win the beautiful Fátima. In fact it was dug by the garrison, begun around 1557 and finished between 1564 and 1570, roughly 80 metres deep.

A fire that swept through the town in 1790 also badly damaged the castle, and by the mid-nineteenth century, as the idea of monument preservation took hold in Hungary, the damaged buildings were conserved to halt further decay; into the mid-twentieth century the castle still stood largely as a ruin above the town. A comprehensive renovation and conservation of the fortification has been under way since the late 1950s, with restored buildings progressively opened for museum use.

The castle today houses exhibitions of the Trenčín Museum — historic furniture, weapons, paintings and other artefacts, together with a castle gallery and archaeological collections — and is administered by the Trenčín self-governing region. It is protected as a National Cultural Monument of Slovakia and attracted around 100,000 visitors in 2006.