I invite you today to the beautiful castle on the left bank of the river called Pilica.
On the mountainside there are the ruins of an older castle and this castle was build by Stanislaw Warszycki.
Old documents and plans show that this fortification was once owned by Wojciech Padniewski.
The new fortification was erected mostly on the plan of a rectangle 300 x170 meters.
As the old custom required four wall bastions filled with earth were built in all corners.
The tract through the damn led to the main gate that was situated on the south-east side. The castle has the shape of a classical palace surrounded by four fortresses.
At this moment the castle is somewhat ruined, the saddest impression is made by the couch-house attached to the left side of the castle. On the opposite side there is situated a court annex which is at this moment changed into a residential building.
The palace contains forty rooms, and consists of four wings which circle the courtyard. The interior includes, a hall covered with a beautiful beech floor. On the first floor is a cupboard- hall with a beautiful wooden ceiling and dining room with a coffered ceiling.
Underground corridors connected the bastions about which I wrote above. Two of them were leveled in the seventeenth century .All projects were surrounded by a moat to which pipes transported the water ten kilometers long.
The park which stretches out and surrounds the palace is worth seeing too. The park itself is an example of gardener’s art. One can see here the lime tree of Queen Elisabeth, the wife of the famous polish king Jagiello. This tree is six meters in circumference.
Pilica Palace has one of the best-outlined bastions built in the seventeenth century .The architect of the fortifications was Warszycki. Inside of the bastions were underground magazines of arms and food, and all corridors were connected together and reinforced.
If we look back we can see that this was the defensive stronghold of the Toporczyk dynasty. This was a very pugnacious dynasty.
This was where one of the branches of this famous dynasty started a settlement, in the valley of the river through which commercial tracts run, from Krakow to Wroclaw. Later the family changed the name to Pilecki , and from this dynasty came Elisabeth Pilecka the third wife of Jagiello the king of Poland .In the place of the old settlement a new castle was built by Padniewski in 1610.As the story goes, one day the greedy Padniewski invited a group of local beggars for a festive meal but before the meal he asked them ,forced them rather, to undress and thoroughly wash themselves. To their horrifying despair their beggar rags were confiscated and searched. The servants found enormous fortune, hidden in the rags by these resourceful beggars. Some say that Pilecki later moved by conscience, erected a shelter for the poor and neglected. Some peasants today can still distinguish among the ruins of the castle the chapel in which a beautiful girl was immured alive because she refused to marry the cruel ruler.
According to some, once a year the Ghost of the White Lady appears and only disappears when night ends. Since the demise of the Warszycki dynasty the castle has had a lot of owners. In the seventeenth century the castle was conquered by the Swedish army. In the eighteenth century, it was in the possession of the Waza dynasty and then was rebuilt in the French style, with a beautiful baroque garden. An enormous contribution was made by Krystyn August Moes in the nineteenth century for the restoration of the castle walls.
The castle is open all year. This beautiful fortification is located in the Cieszyn district, twenty kilometers east from city of Zawiercie. You can reach this place from Olkusz by taking a bus to Wolbron or Ogrodzieniec and then you can even walk to Pilica. Close to the castle is a big parking lot for your comfort if you travel by car.
Happy touring!
Jan from Poland
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