Nesvizh Castle

Nesvizh was the principal seat of the Radziwill family, who held it from 1533 until 1939, and the castle was rebuilt continuously across that span: Mikolaj Krzysztof Radziwill, called Sierotka, began the first stone version in 1582 within earth bastions and finished it by 1604, and successive generations added ranges, changed the fronts and remodelled the interiors, so the building carries Renaissance, baroque, rococo and classicist work together around a courtyard. Restoration completed in 2012 opened around thirty rooms as a museum. Landscape parks laid out in the nineteenth century surround the lakes. The Corpus Christi church in the town, by the Italian architect Giovanni Maria Bernardoni and completed in 1593, holds the Radziwill family crypt.

History

The Nesvizh estate was owned by the Radziwill family from 1533, and in 1582 Mikolaj Krzysztof "Sierotka" Radziwill started building an imposing square three-storey château, completed by 1604. In 1706 the army of Charles XII sacked the castle and wrecked its fortifications, and with the Second Partition of Poland in 1793 it became part of Russia. In 1939 the Red Army expelled the Radziwill family and in Soviet times the castle was used as a sanatorium; the complex was listed as a World Heritage Site in 2005 and extensively restored from 2004 to 2012 (Wikipedia, Nesvizh Castle).

Highlights

• The courtyard ranges - the successive building periods around one court.
• The museum rooms - the restored interiors through the palace.
• The parks and lakes - the nineteenth-century landscape around the castle.
• Corpus Christi church - the 1593 church and the Radziwill crypt.

When to go

May to September for the parks; the museum works year round with reduced winter hours and closes on some days. Weekends bring coach groups. It combines with Mir castle, half an hour away.

Practical notes

Interiors are restoration rather than surviving ensembles, since the contents were dispersed. The museum route is long and can be crowded. The crypt in the town church has its own access hours. The town is small.

Nearby

Mir castle lies northwest; Slutsk is east.

Key facts