Kamianets-Podilskyi Castle

The fortress guarding the bridge into Kamianets enters the written record in January 1374, when Prince Yuriy Koriatovych, with the consent of his brother Oleksandr, granted the townspeople Magdeburg rights in a charter issued, as the document itself notes, 'at the castle'. Western Rus' then lay under the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the castle was long assumed to date from the second half of that century. Excavations begun in the 1960s pushed its origins back, perhaps as far as the twelfth century, and confirmed that an earthen fortress of the Kievan Rus' era had stood in the area, though not on the same site.

By 1400 the works were outdated but still vital to the defence of Kamianets and its trade routes, so Spytek of Melsztyn, voivode of Kraków, renovated the old towers and added ten new ones. The decisive rebuilding came in the mid-sixteenth century under the military engineer Hiob Bretfus, who raised the New Western and New Eastern towers in 1544 along with the eastern wall and an underground gallery. An inspection that same year recorded the result: a mature fortress whose outline the castle has kept, through every ordeal since, for nearly five hundred years.

Standing on a strategic crossroads in Podilia, the castle held one of the main frontiers of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. From 1434 until 1793 it anchored the defence against Cossack, Ottoman and Tatar invasion; between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries Tatar hordes attacked it fifty-one times. The assaults of 1448, 1451, 1509 and 1528, and an Ottoman siege in 1533, damaged both castle and city, but every one of them was repelled. In the sixteenth century the garrison ran to some three hundred soldiers, quartered in the town.

The Khmelnytsky Uprising brought the Zaporozhian Cossacks, allied with the Crimean Tatars and the local peasantry, against the Commonwealth. Cossacks and insurgents under Maksym Kryvonis besieged the castle without success. In 1651 otaman Ivan Bohun invested it again, until an unexpected counterattack by Polish commanders Aleksandrenka and Chuika broke the siege. Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky himself brought an army of 60,000 against the fortress in 1652, and only a year later a Crimean Tatar horde 40,000 strong attacked once more.

In early August 1672 Sultan Mehmed IV arrived with a vast Ottoman army, joined by some 40,000 Tatars and Cossacks under Hetman Petro Doroshenko. The city's leaders negotiated, and on 18 August surrendered the fortress. For twenty-seven years it served as the base of Ottoman rule in Podolia; during an unsuccessful Polish siege in 1687 the Turks rebuilt and fortified the castle bridge, which locals still call the Turkish bridge. The peace treaty of 1699 returned the region to Poland.

Local legend reaches back to 1621, when Sultan Osman II, unable to take the city, is said to have asked who built so strong a place. Told 'God himself', he replied, 'Then let God himself take the city.' The 1672 siege was later depicted in Henryk Sienkiewicz's 1888 novel, in which a fictional commandant, in a sign of protest, blows up the castle's remaining gunpowder.

From the early eighteenth century the castle served less as a fortification than as a military prison, holding Cossack officers and haidamakas, yet it remained among the strongest fortresses of the Polish Crown until the Second Partition of 21 April 1793 transferred it to the Russian Empire. That day the commandant handed over the castle key and swore allegiance in the city's cathedral, saluted by 101 cannon inside the walls. From 1816 to 1914 the fortress was a jail for debtors, criminals and political prisoners, the best remembered of them Ustym Karmaliuk (1787-1835), leader of the anti-feudal movement in Podolia and now a Ukrainian folk hero, who was kept in the Pope's Tower.

A 1928 decree of the Ukrainian SSR declared the complex a historical-cultural preserve, and reconstruction for a museum began in 1937, with visitor numbers reaching 300,000 a year by the late 1930s. The National Historic-Architectural Reserve 'Kamianets' followed in 1977, nomination to the UNESCO tentative list in 1989, and in 2007 third place in the nationwide vote that named the castle one of the Seven Wonders of Ukraine. A severe storm in August 2011 partially destroyed the New Western Tower of 1544.