Trakai Island Castle

Few castles make their setting do so much of the work. Trakai's red-brick fortress fills most of an island in Lake Galvė, a lake with 21 islands in the lake country west of Vilnius, and it is reached on foot over a footbridge. For Lithuanians it is the most tangible image of the medieval Grand Duchy, when Trakai was one of the main centres of the state.

Grand Duke Kęstutis began building in stone in the second half of the 14th century and moved his residence and treasury here; the works were largely finished around 1409 under his son Vytautas the Great, who died in the castle in 1430. The builders used Gothic red brick over stone footings. The complex has two parts: a ducal palace with a tall keep, closed around an inner courtyard that once had wooden galleries, and a larger outer bailey ringed by walls and corner towers, separated from the palace by a moat. The ducal hall on the palace's ground floor was one of the largest rooms in the country. After the victory at Grunwald in 1410 the fortress lost its military point, served for a time as a royal residence and later as a prison, and was wrecked during the wars with Muscovy in the 1650s.

What stands now is largely a reconstruction. Restorers worked on it in the 1930s, and a major campaign between 1951 and 1961, pushed through by Lithuanian specialists despite resistance from Soviet officials, rebuilt the palace to its 15th-century form. Since 1962 it has housed the Trakai History Museum, with archaeological finds from the site, exhibitions on the Grand Duchy and the castle's own story, and concerts and festivals in the courtyard in summer. The classic view is from the shore of Lake Galvė, and the town itself sits inside Trakai Historical National Park, set up in 1991.

Getting there

The castle is on the edge of Trakai, a small lakeside town about 28 km west of central Vilnius; most visitors come as a day trip from the capital. The nearest airport is Vilnius International (VNO), about 23 km away. From the town the castle is reached on foot along the shore and across the footbridge to the island.