The first Trakai, a brick castle of Gediminas that served briefly as the Lithuanian capital and is remembered as the birthplace of Vytautas the Great.
Senieji Trakai, Old Trakai, lies about four kilometres south-east of the modern town of Trakai in eastern Lithuania. Grand Duke Gediminas built a brick castle here before 1321 — an unusual choice in a region that still built in timber and earth — and for a few years around 1316 to 1323 it served as the seat of the Lithuanian grand dukes, between Kernavė and the move to Vilnius.
The name distinguishes it from the New Trakai founded a short distance away, whose island castle on Lake Galvė became the more famous residence. Old Trakai never recovered that status, and its later history is monastic rather than ducal.
In 1337 Senieji Trakai became the seat of the newly created Duchy of Trakai, the western half of a divided Lithuania, held by Gediminas's son Kęstutis. The duchy faced the Teutonic Order across the Nemunas, and its lords spent two generations in near-continuous frontier war.
Kęstutis built a new castle at what is now Trakai, first on the peninsula and then on the island in Lake Galvė, and the ducal household moved to it. Old Trakai was left as a secondary residence and an estate centre, which is why the 1391 attack that destroyed it did not end the duchy.
Vytautas the Great, son of Kęstutis, was born at Old Trakai about 1350, and the tradition linking him to the place is old and consistent even though no document records the birth. His career was made in the rivalry with his cousin Jogaila that twice drove him into Teutonic exile and ended with him ruling Lithuania as grand duke from 1392 until his death in 1430.
The site therefore sits at the start of the reign that produced the joint Polish-Lithuanian victory at the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 and the largest extent Lithuania ever reached. Vytautas himself governed from Vilnius and from the island castle at Trakai rather than from the older site.
In 1391 the Teutonic Order destroyed the castle at Senieji Trakai during one of the campaigns of the Lithuanian civil war, when the Order was supporting Vytautas against Jogaila. It was not rebuilt as a fortress.
In 1405 Vytautas gave the ruined site to Benedictine monks, the first Benedictine house in Lithuania, brought from Tyniec near Kraków. The monastery church and cloister that stand there now are thought to incorporate the remains of the brick castle in their fabric, which is the closest thing to a surviving Gediminid structure on the site.
The village centre is a protected architectural reserve of single-storey wooden houses, and the church and monastic buildings occupy the low platform where the castle stood. Excavation has recovered the castle's plan and its brickwork below ground, together with material from the settlement that served it.
Old Trakai is consequently one of the few places where the physical beginnings of the Gediminid dynasty can be examined at all, since the timber fortifications of Kernavė and the earliest phases at Vilnius survive even less well.