Uzhhorod Castle

The castle gives the town its name: Uzhhorod, Hungarian Ungvár, means the castle on the Uzh. The first stronghold on the hill is placed in the ninth century, a timber fortress of inner keep and palisade above a settlement of White Croats, and the Gesta Hungarorum records that the castle and the whole country around it belonged to Prince Laborets, who ruled the principality here. When the Magyars came against him the people took up the fight; Nestor's chronicle, under the year 898, has the newcomers pressing from the east across the great mountains that were named the Hungarian mountains after them, taking Uzhhorod and burning the castle. Laborets fled towards his distant fortress at Zemplín, was overtaken and hanged above the river Svirzhava, and the people afterwards called that river the Laborets in memory of the prince.

The Magyar leader Álmos was killed in the fighting for Uzhhorod, and his people buried him in the rampart of the Zemplín hillfort, which they had also taken; Czechoslovak archaeologists uncovered his richly gilded grave. At the turn of the eleventh century the lowland of Transcarpathia passed under the comitat of Ung, and the hill carried a work of real strength: in 1086 a Cuman horde under Khan Kutesk broke through the Carpathian passes into the Danube lowland but could not take Uzhhorod.

Stone castles were built across Transcarpathia in earnest after the Tatar invasion; the Tatars withdrew but the fear stayed, and King Béla IV ordered the strongpoints made stronger. The earliest stone buildings on the site may be dated to the thirteenth century, and a castle church was raised in the same century, recorded in writing as the church of St George in 1248. Long ruined, and for a time only guessed at, its foundations were opened by excavation and have been conserved on the site.

In 1312, after the Italian Drugeth brothers helped Charles Robert of Anjou put down the revolt of the nadzhupan Petenyi, the king granted them Uzhhorod Castle and its lands, and the family held it for some three and a half centuries. They put up a rectangular defensive structure with rhomboid bastions in the manner of the castles of southern Italy. Firearms then forced a rebuilding: at the end of the sixteenth century Italian engineers reconstructed the castle to the newest European practice, raising heavier walls at a distance from the palace, throwing a rhomboid bastion 10 to 15 metres high beyond the line of the wall at every corner, and setting guns on the bastion platforms to cover the approaches. A ditch 8 to 10 metres deep ran round three sides, crossed at the gate by a drawbridge whose chain openings survive, and the north face was left a smooth sweep of high walling without so much as a loophole.

The palace on the north-east of Castle Hill was also the citadel, ditched on three sides and reached by its own drawbridge, so a garrison pushed out of the courtyard could keep up the defence from inside it. Underneath were casemates that served as storerooms in peacetime and as shelter under siege, together with a prison and a torture chamber. The northern part was built directly above the drop, the slope so steep that no enemy ever tried to storm the castle from that side. It was in the castle church that the Union of Uzhhorod was concluded on 24 April 1646, when 63 Transcarpathian priests of the Orthodox eparchy of Mukachevo entered union with Rome.

When the Drugeth male line died out in 1691, the heiress to the vast Drugeth dominions, Kristina, married Count Miklós Bercsényi, a match that made him the third richest man in Hungary. Through the thirteen years the couple held Uzhhorod, at the turn of the eighteenth century, the late Renaissance palace within the walls saw balls held regularly and distinguished guests received. Bercsényi is remembered as a leading figure of Rákóczi's War of Independence; he lived in that fortified palace, and it was there that he treated with the ambassadors of Peter the Great and of Louis XIV over the making of an anti-Habsburg alliance. In 1707 the castle received the envoys of Peter I with ceremony for talks with the representatives of Francis II Rákóczi.

The town prepared for a siege, laying in grain for half a year in the hope that relief would arrive within it and driving in cattle from the whole district for meat. Up to three or four hundred of the Hungarian nobility took refuge in the castle, and the Jesuits with them. In the autumn of 1703 several hundred Rusyn peasants appeared around Uzhhorod, the peasant army of Ivan Betsa of Vyriava come down from the mountains; he seized the village of Horiany outside the town and drove the nobles' cattle up into the hills, then came out of the forests again with several hundred highlanders. The street fighting in Uzhhorod was fierce. The insurgents were forced out of the town at first and fell back on Radvanka and Horiany, but substantial reinforcement came from the Verkhovyna, and in a second attack by night they took Uzhhorod and closed a tight ring round the castle.

The nobleman György Paloni kept a diary inside the besieged walls: "What times have come. Our subjects and serfs have risen against their lords, they chase us, they hunt us like dogs, and they want to torment us with hunger. A crowd of Rusyns in their homespun coats came down from the mountains, occupied the town … and, ever growing, surrounded the fortress." The peasants, armed with scythes and axes and old muskets, made several assaults and were beaten off by the better-armed defenders; they tried scaling ladders, then brought up cartloads of straw all round the castle to force it to surrender by fire. The outcome is told two ways: that the fortification came through its many sieges without ever being taken, and that the fortress of Uzhhorod finally surrendered at the beginning of 1704.

Betsa of Vyriava led the Rusyn peasants who occupied the castle, with a marked part in the siege taken by the men of the highland villages, the Kovachi, Dobei, Herzanychi, Brenzovychi and Kossei. Provisioning was their difficulty, for the force had been supplied from the estates of the nobility and Rákóczi now forbade the wrecking of those estates. Writing of these events in his memoirs he sharply condemned what the peasants had done and insisted they had done it without his instruction, noting that there would never be common ground with the nobles in the struggle against the Austrian oppressors and that deep hatred drove the peasants against their lords. He issued a series of orders forbidding his units, on pain of death, to attack the landowners or pursue them, and had one of the leaders of the rising, Albert Kish of Barkasovo, shot for disobedience.

Bercsényi fled Hungary in 1711 and his estates were confiscated to the Austrian crown. Everything of value went from the castle to Vienna at that point: paintings, furniture, the collection of precious plate, the weapons. The place was modernised during the eighteenth century under Lemaire, a military engineer from France, but with Habsburg territory extending further east the need for a stronghold in this district fell away.

In 1775 the empress Maria Theresa handed the castle to the Greek-Catholic eparchy of Mukachevo for a theological academy, and the Ruthenian Greek-Catholic Church opened a school in it; the rebuilding done then was slight, though the knights' hall was destroyed. Fire ravaged the castle grounds in 1728 and again in 1879. The bronze turul, the mythical bird of the early Hungarians, was carried into the courtyard in 1945 from a monument then being demolished at Vylok, which had marked Francis II Rákóczi's victory over Austrian forces in 1703.

The castle has been used as the regional museum since 1947. It is listed among the Architectural Heritage of National Importance of Ukraine, ranks among the most visited sites in Uzhhorod and in Ukraine, and took second place in the 2009 Seven Wonders of Transcarpathia. A bust of Count Miklós Bercsényi was set in the inner courtyard in the winter of 2012, and one of his wife, Countess Kristina, on 8 November 2013, both funded by the Hungarian consulate general in the city.