Khotyn Fortress

Khotyn Fortress rises from a rocky shelf on the high right bank of the Dniester in the town of Khotyn, in Ukraine's Chernivtsi Oblast. The river crossing here lay on old trade routes between the Baltic, Kyiv and the Black Sea, and the site has been fortified since the time of Kievan Rus', when an earthen mound with wooden walls guarded the crossing and a first, small stone building stood where the northern tower is now. Between 1250 and 1264 Prince Danylo of Halych and his son Lev rebuilt it in stone, but the fortress that survives is essentially Moldavian. After Khotyn passed to the Principality of Moldavia in the late 14th century, the princes Alexander the Good and above all Stephen the Great rebuilt it on a far larger scale: walls five to six metres thick, decorated with geometric patterns laid in the masonry, new towers, and a courtyard raised by some ten metres and split into a princes' court and a soldiers' court, with deep cellars below.

For four centuries the fortress sat on the fault line between Moldavia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, and it changed hands accordingly. In 1476 its garrison held off Sultan Mehmed II. Its most famous episode came in September and October 1621, when a Commonwealth army under Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, fighting alongside Zaporozhian Cossacks led by Petro Sahaidachny, dug in beside the fortress and withstood a much larger Ottoman army under Osman II; the peace signed on 8 October fixed the frontier on the Dniester. Jan Sobieski took Khotyn in 1673, the Ottomans rebuilt and enlarged the defences in 1712-1718, and Russian armies stormed it in 1739, 1769 and 1788. It became Russian for good in 1812, a church of St Alexander Nevsky was built inside in 1832, and in 1856 the fortress was struck off the list of military installations.

The stone citadel has been a protected architectural monument since 1963, and in 2000 the Ukrainian government made it a state historical and architectural reserve; it was later voted one of the Seven Wonders of Ukraine. Film-makers have long used it as a stand-in for western European castles: Soviet adaptations of The Three Musketeers (1978) and Ivanhoe (1983) were shot here, among many others. Visitors walk the courtyards, walls and towers, with the river directly below. In April 2026 the outer masonry layer of one of the great walls partly collapsed after a hard winter and a wet spring.

Getting there

The fortress is in the town of Khotyn on the Dniester; the larger city of Kamianets-Podilskyi, with its own famous castle, is about 19 km away. The nearest practical airport is Suceava (SCV) in Romania, about 93 km away across the border.