Pidhirtsi Castle

Grand Crown Hetman Stanisław Koniecpolski bought Pidhirtsi from the Pidhoretsky family in 1633; fortifications on the site are recorded as early as 1530. Who designed what replaced them has never been settled: art historians credit the defences to Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan and the palace to Andrea dell'Acqua, though no document ties either man to the site, while the surviving records name Mikołaj Silvestri as master of works and, after his death in 1638, Johann Ludwig von Wolzogen.

Building ran from 1635 to 1640 and produced a palazzo in fortezza: a square of nearly a hundred metres a side, five-sided bastions at the corners, and a stone-lined ditch with earth ramparts on three sides. In 1646 fireworks greeted King Władysław IV Vasa, who came with his French wife Ludwika Maria Gonzaga; Koniecpolski died soon after their visit.

Ukrainian Cossacks attacked during the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1648 and could not take the place; they returned three years later and failed again, though the complex was badly damaged. Koniecpolski's son Aleksander repaired it and strengthened the fortifications, and rebuilding begun in 1656 ran on to 1680. The improved defences are credited with carrying it through the Tatar and Turkish attacks of the later seventeenth century, though a Tatar raid in 1688 did fresh damage.

In 1682 the hetman's grandson, a second Stanisław Koniecpolski, willed the castle and its estates to the Sobieskis; five years later Jakub Ludwik Sobieski, on his way home from the campaign against the Ottomans at Kamieniec Podolski, received his parents here — King Jan III Sobieski and Marie Casimire Louise.

In the 1720s Konstanty Sobieski, Jakub's younger brother, sold the castle to Great Crown Hetman Stanisław Rzewuski. His son Wacław, who also held nearby Olesko, made Podhorce his permanent residence and from 1728 rebuilt it: a third storey went up between the pavilions and the tower, the drawbridge came down, and the house gained a printing press, a theatre and an orchestra. Wacław also commissioned a rotunda church as the family burial vault.

Rzewuski went to Warsaw in 1767 for the debates of the Sejm, was arrested by the Russians and sent to Kaluga, and never returned to Podhorce. The Partition of 1772 placed the castle under Austria, still in Rzewuski hands, though the Austrian-imposed administrator auctioned off part of the collections. Wacław died in 1779 and his son Seweryn bought the estate back in 1787. Decline set in early in the nineteenth century under a steward who sold the valuables off by degrees, and under Seweryn's heir Wacław, who died in 1831.

Leon Rzewuski moved in in 1833, put the stripped roof, doors and glazing back in order and prepared the house as a museum. The family held Podhorce until 1869; childless, Leon passed it to Prince Sanguszko on condition that he restore it, and thorough restoration ran from 1867 to 1903.

Russian troops looted the castle in the First World War. In the summer of 1915 it became headquarters of the Fifth Austro-Hungarian Corps and stood on the front line; General Aleksei Brusilov spared the building, but it was ransacked again and its interior — walls, tiles, floors — destroyed. The Polish–Soviet War brought more damage. Between the wars, in the Tarnopol Voivodeship of the Second Polish Republic, it housed the Sanguszko princes' private museum. In September 1939 Prince Roman Sanguszko, the last Polish owner, packed most of the collection and took it to Romania and then to São Paulo. Soviet authorities handed the palace to the Lviv Historical Museum in 1940; in 1945 soldiers of the Zolochiv garrison plundered it.

The museum was closed in 1947 and a tuberculosis sanatorium installed in 1949. In February 1956 fire burned through the castle for three weeks, destroying valuable paintings and leaving little but the walls. The sanatorium stayed on until Ukrainian independence, and plans then to turn the castle into a presidential residence came to nothing.

In 1997, after public petitioning and the work of Borys Voznytsky, Pidhirtsi passed to the Lviv art gallery, which holds 85 per cent of its movable contents. The castle is listed on the State Register of Immovable Monuments of Ukraine as architectural heritage of national importance, and in 2008 it was named to the World Monuments Watch. In June 2018 the palace opened its first exhibition since 1939. It belongs to the Lviv National Art Gallery, and restoration goes slowly for lack of funds.