Olesko Castle

Olesko was probably raised on its hill above the Libertsia by a son of the Galician-Volhynian prince Yuri Lvovych. The first castle was a low oval enclosure whose stone wall partly survives as the lower tier of the building today. Olesko is first named in a document of 1327, when it passed to Prince Yuri II of Galicia-Volhynia; other accounts date the first record instead to 1390, when Pope Boniface IX gave Olesko and Tustan to a Catholic bishop of Halych.

The castle sat on the boundary of Volhynia and Galicia, on the shifting Polish–Lithuanian frontier, and was fought over continually. The Lithuanian prince Liubart held it from 1340 until Casimir III the Great took it in 1366; Władysław of Opole then handed Olesko, Rohatyn and Tustan to the new Latin archbishopric of Halych in 1375, and rebels seized the castle briefly in protest. Hungarian troops garrisoned it from 1377 and gave it up to Liubart for a ransom five years later.

Olesko held out against the Polish magnates for half a century. In 1431, while Jagiełło was besieging Lutsk, Prince Casimir II of Belz marched on Olesko; the fortress did not yield, its defence led by the castle's holder and joined by local boyars. Under the truce of 2 September a string of frontier castles passed to the Poles while Olesko remained Svidrigailo's.

A charter of October 1432 assigned Olesko to the Polish Crown; neither Svidrigailo nor the Olesko landholders accepted it, and Jagiełło sent his best court regiments against them. The fortress fell late that year after a long siege and was granted in perpetuity to Jan of Sienno, whose descendants came to be called Oleski.

Tatar hordes came through in 1442 and 1453. In 1512 the villagers around gathered behind the walls again, and this time the fortress did not survive the siege. Seven years later the raiders returned: one of its lords, Marcin Kamieniecki, fled, while the other, Fryderyk Herburt, was killed with his retainers at the battle of Sokal on 2 August 1519. That was the last Tatar raid on Olesko.

In 1605 the castle came to Jan Daniłowicz, voivode of the Ruthenian Voivodeship from 1614, under whom the old oval enclosure was absorbed into two-storey east and west ranges. Mykhailo Khmel, father of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, served him here and followed him to Chyhyryn as deputy starosta. Two Polish kings were born in the castle: Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki, and — to Daniłowicz's daughter Teofila and her husband Jakub Sobieski, on 17 August 1629 — the future Jan III Sobieski, victor over the Turks at Vienna.

In 1648, during the war led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, Cossack and peasant companies freed Olesko and the lords fled; the Koniecpolskis soon returned and divided the estates among seventeen creditors. In the early 1680s Jan III Sobieski, born in the castle and by then king, took it from the family, by one account for 400,000 złoty and by another in settlement of their debts, and had the whole building re-roofed and the park restored.

The war with the Swedes and Peter I's alliance with the Poles brought Russian troops to Olesko, quartered there from 1707 for five years. In 1716 the castle passed to the king's son Jakub, who sold it three years later to Stanisław Mateusz Rzewuski, whose son Seweryn turned it into a lavish palace in the taste of the century. In 1755 the valuables went to Pidhirtsi Castle, and in 1796 Olesko was bought by Aleksander Zieliński.

Fire took hold in 1806, and under the Lityński family, owners from 1824, the building suffered its heaviest losses. The earthquake of 23 January 1838 cracked the walls and left a run of rooms unfit to live in, and the owners did comparable damage themselves: the hunt for more of a treasure found walled up in one room tore open painted walls and lifted floors. The castle's deep well collapsed in 1875, and by the end of the century Olesko was a ruin.

Money raised at Lviv in 1882 bought the castle for the state, the Committee of Preservation of the Olesko Castle taking charge of a monument by then regarded as Polish national property. The roof and some rooms were restored at the start of the 1890s. Both world wars undid earlier restoration work, lightning struck in 1956, and the last long programme ran from 1961 to 1985. Olesko is now a museum of 16th- and 17th-century furnishings and art, listed on the State Register of Immovable Monuments of Ukraine as architectural heritage of national importance and standing with Pidhirtsi and Zolochiv as one of the three castles of the "Golden Horseshoe".