Description of the attraction
A unique historical monument and defensive architecture of the 17th century. is the Zolochiv castle, which is located on the outskirts of the city of Zolochiv, Lviv region.
The first written mentions of the Zolochevsky castle date back to 1532, when the owner of the city Stanislav Seninsky sold it to Count Gurkov. After the castle became the property of Yakov Sobessky, who in 1634 rebuilt and fortified it with four bastions. After the reconstruction, the castle took the form of a bastion-type citadel. It was surrounded by earthen ramparts, at the corners of which there were bastions with watchtowers.
On the territory of the castle there was a two-storey palace built in the Renaissance style, as well as a Chinese palace. The special pride of the Zolochiv Castle is its toilets, which have a rather original design. Some of them have survived to this day.
At the end of the XVII century. the owner of the castle was the Polish king Jan III Sobieski, who inherited it from his father. In 1672 the castle was badly destroyed by the Turks, but by 1675 it was rebuilt. After the death of the Polish king Jan III, his son, Prince Jacob, lived in the castle, after his death, in 1737, the castle passed into the possession of the Radziwill family, who did not particularly care about the castle and as a result, the structure began to collapse.
The Komarnitskys became the new owners of Zolochev in 1802. After restoring the castle, they sold it to the Austrian government, after which it first housed military barracks, and then a prison and a courtroom.
In 1939, the castle housed the NKVD department, during the German occupation - the Gestapo, in the post-war years vocational school, and only in 1986 a museum was opened in the castle. Nowadays Zolochiv Castle is a museum-reserve, a branch of the Lviv Art Gallery, in which its entire planning structure, formed during the 17th century, has been preserved.
