Khotyn Fortress

Archaeologists date a small wooden fort on the rocky Dniester headland to the eighth or ninth century. After Volodymyr the Great's campaign brought the lands of the White Croats and Tivertsi under Kyiv, stronger works went up at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries — an earth rampart with wooden hoardings, and a ditch cut across the neck of the rock — guarding a major river crossing on the south-western defence line of Kyivan Rus'. Khotyn answered to Terebovlia by the late eleventh century, to Halych in the 1140s, and to Galicia–Volhynia by 1199.

When the first stone was laid is disputed; Danylo of Halych and his son Lev are credited with rebuilding the fortress between 1250 and 1264, adding a stone wall and a moat six metres wide.

Dragoș, a Moldavian prince and vassal of the Hungarian crown, took Khotyn in the 1340s; after 1375 it belonged to Moldavia. Under Alexander the Good and then Stephen the Great, who directed the work himself, the castle was rebuilt on the scale it still keeps: walls five to six metres thick and forty metres high, the courtyard raised ten metres and divided between a princely court and a soldiers' court. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century it served as a residence of the Moldavian princes.

In 1476 the garrison held the fortress against the Turkish army of Sultan Mehmed II. Moldavia became a tributary of the Ottoman Empire, and a janissary detachment was quartered inside the walls alongside the Moldavian troops, while the Turks strengthened the defences.

In 1538 a Polish army under Great Crown Hetman Jan Tarnowski took Khotyn, mining the walls, bringing down three towers and part of the western curtain and laying a charge to finish it; the fortress was spared when the Moldavian prince Petru Rareș came to terms and swore loyalty to Sigismund I. Repairs followed between 1540 and 1544. In 1563 Dmytro Vyshnevetsky and five hundred Zaporozhian Cossacks seized the place and held it for a time, and in May 1600 Prince Ieremia Movilă sheltered behind its walls from Michael the Brave.

Polish troops retook Khotyn in 1615 to seat their own candidate on the Moldavian throne, withdrew under the treaty of 1617, and seized it again in 1620, the year their army was destroyed at Cecora. From September to October 1621 a Commonwealth and Cossack army under Jan Karol Chodkiewicz and Petro Sahaidachny held the ground against a far larger Ottoman and Tatar force under Sultan Osman II. On 8 October the Khotyn peace treaty halted the Ottoman advance and fixed the border on the Dniester, Khotyn returning to Moldavia as an Ottoman vassal.

Bohdan Khmelnytsky held the fortress briefly in the spring of 1650, and its Turkish garrison fought at Zhvanets in 1653. In November 1673 Jan Sobieski beat the Turks below the walls with a Polish, Moldavian and Cossack army and took the place — a victory that won him the byname Lion of Khotyn and, next year, election as king. He wrote of it: "More than 60 guns were thundering non-stop, the sky was in flames and smothered in smoke, the earth was quaking, the walls were groaning, the rocks were splitting into pieces." The Turks had it back by August 1674; Sobieski retook it in 1684, and the Karlowitz treaty of 1699 handed it to Moldavia.

From the 1710s Khotyn lay under direct Ottoman administration, and the Turks rebuilt it with French engineers in works completed in 1718. Around the old castle rose the New Fortress — earth ramparts, bastions and wide ditches faced in dressed stone, a mosque and minaret within — laid out to hold a garrison of twenty thousand. In 1739, after beating the Turks at Stavuchany, the Russians laid siege, and the Turkish commander Iliaş Colceag surrendered to Burkhard Christoph von Münnich.

In 1788 Austrians under Prince Friedrich and Russians under General Ivan Saltykov invested the place for four months and eight days. On 19 September the commandant Osman Pasha capitulated on terms that let his people carry away their goods — 2,700 carts were used — and the allies entered on 1 October to find the town empty and badly damaged. Russian forces took the fortress at the start of the war of 1806 and held it until the Treaty of Bucharest of 1812 gave Russia the land between Dniester and Prut as Bessarabia. Khotyn was struck off the list of military installations in 1856 and made a state historical and architectural reserve on 12 October 2000; on 17 April 2026 the outer masonry of one of the great walls partly collapsed.