Chervonohorod Castle

Nuremberg furniture, an arms collection, parquet floors, a colonnade of six stone columns on an Italian terrace and eight hectares of landscaped park with a fountain: that was the inventory at Chervonohorod up to the First World War, when it ranked among the best-kept country houses in the region. Two cracked round towers are what is left of it.

They stand on a bluff in the Dzhuryn ravine between Nyrkiv and Nahoriany, a few kilometres short of the Dnister. Red sandstone in the cliffs named the town and the whole tract. Almost everyone who walks past is on the way down to the waterfall; the towers are the reason to stop first.

The castle under the palace

A wooden fort of the Rus princes stood here until the Mongol campaign of 1241 destroyed it. The Koriatovych princes rebuilt in timber in the 14th century, and Tatar and Wallachian raiders burned that one in 1538.

Stone arrived only in the early 17th century. Mykola Danylovych, castellan of Lviv and starosta of Chervonohorod, put up a rectangular castle with a tower at each corner, ringed by a defensive wall with a gate. It lasted two generations. Rebels took it in 1648 during the Khmelnytsky uprising; in 1672 it fell to the army of Mehmed IV, the same campaign that took Kamianets-Podilskyi. The people who came back afterwards found it gutted, and for over a century nobody repaired it.

A country house on fortress footings

In 1778 the Austrian authorities sold the estate to Prince Karol Poniński, and around 1820 he turned the ruin into a residence, pulling down two towers and part of the buildings for material and raising a palace on the old castle foundations. His son Kalikst decided the surviving towers were too low, took those down as well, and built the taller pair standing now. Frederick Bauman is credited with the Poniński rebuilds, and the 1820 project is attributed to the architect Julius Zakharov.

The finishing came from elsewhere. Crenellations and dressed stone for the round towers were ordered in Lviv and carted out here. One tower carries a stair built into the thickness of its wall and a passage out at the bottom. Maria Lubomirska, the last owner to keep the house properly, held it in order until 1914.

How it came apart

Shelling damaged the palace in the First World War and the family could not afford repairs; the interwar years brought none, and the Second World War finished the building. On the night of 2 February 1945 the fighting between UPA units and the local Polish self-defence reached Chervonohorod, and the church burned. It had gone up in 1615 on the Lisiecki family's money and been rebuilt in 1716; the roof came down around the 1970s, but the vaults are still standing.

In April 2013 half of one tower collapsed. The ruins belong to the Ternopil eparchy of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and in May 2024 Metropolitan Epifaniy signed a memorandum with a charitable foundation on conserving and restoring the church and the palace. Nothing has been rebuilt yet.

What people say about the ruins

Empty towers over an empty valley collect stories. The commonest is a tunnel running from the castle to a monastery, its entrance guarded by a stone knight who comes to life if anyone tries it. Another has a white figure among the ruins at night, the mistress of the house who lost her betrothed in a siege. A third has the castle treasurer burying the valuables under the foundations and cursing them: the gold surfaces only on Kupala night, and whoever reaches for it takes the curse with it. The fourth is a black wolf, the transformed spirit of the most faithful guard.

Getting there, and staying out of trouble

Nyrkiv, in Chortkiv district of Ternopil oblast, is the landmark. Driving from Lviv the line is Ternopil, Terebovlia, Zalishchyky, then the turn for Nyrkiv; on public transport, get to Zalishchyky and take the local bus. From the village a field track drops to the towers and the falls — steep, twisting, slippery after rain — so leave the car at the top and walk.

Treat the ruins as unsafe, because they are. The masonry is coming away, one tower has already lost half of itself, and nothing is fenced or shored: stay off the walls and out of the damaged structures. Bring water and food; there are no shops. Dzhuryn Falls is minutes below, and the Hermit's cave, the Dnister canyon and the Shyshkovi Horby — outcrops of an old coral reef above the river near Nahoriany — are all close by.