The lake fortress that was the seat of Vytautas the Great, completed about 1409 and the place where he died in 1430 with a royal crown still on the road.
Trakai (New Trakai) was the primary residence and symbol of power for Vytautas the Great, Grand Duke of Lithuania. The castle, built on a lake island, was the center of Lithuanian ducal administration in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
Two castles stand at Trakai rather than one: an earlier stronghold on the peninsula between the lakes, and the island castle in Lake Galvė that gave the place its fame. Water was the defence. An attacker had to cross it under fire, which is why the island works survived assaults that the peninsula could not always turn away.
The dynasty’s first seat was at Senieji Trakai, Old Trakai, a few kilometres south-east, where Vytautas was born about 1350. His father Kęstutis moved the centre of the lordship to the lakes in the second half of the fourteenth century and began the works there, and the family’s quarrels made the new site a prize: Kęstutis and his nephew Jogaila fought over Trakai in the early 1380s, and Vytautas held it only after years of exile and open war against his own kin.
The Teutonic Order came against Trakai repeatedly in those years, most heavily in 1377 and again in the campaigns of 1382 and 1383. The Order’s pressure was the reason the defences were built in brick and on an island, and the reason Vytautas continued building after the fighting stopped.
The major works were finished about 1409, the year before the Order’s army was destroyed in the field. The second building phase added a keep of six storeys rising some 35 metres, containing a chapel, stores and living quarters and joined to the ducal palace by movable gates, with a ducal hall roughly 10 by 21 metres where the grand duke received embassies.
Red Gothic brick gives the castle its character, laid in the manner the Order itself used in Prussia — the technique of the enemy, turned against him. After the Battle of Grunwald in 1410 removed the threat from the north, the fortress passed from a war footing to the life of a residence.
Karaite tradition holds that Vytautas brought some 380 Karaim families from the Crimea after his campaigns against the Tatars in 1397 and 1398 and settled them at Trakai, between the two castles, with others placed at Lutsk and along the Lithuanian frontier. In return for land they held the duty of guarding the town and its castle.
A Karaim quarter grew along the street between the peninsula and the island, and the community kept its Turkic language and its own religious law in Lithuania for six centuries — one of the few medieval settlements of its kind anywhere in Europe that has never been broken up.
Vytautas died at Trakai on 27 October 1430 shortly before a planned royal coronation that would have made him King of Lithuania, a project blocked by his cousin Jogaila. The crown, sent from the Emperor Sigismund, never reached him: Polish lords intercepted the embassy carrying it, and the ceremony was postponed into a season the old grand duke did not survive.
What died with him was the prospect of a Lithuanian kingdom independent of the Polish crown. His cousin Władysław II Jagiełło outlived him by four years, the grand ducal title passed to Svitrigaila and then into civil war, and Lithuania stayed a grand duchy bound to Poland by dynastic union.
Once it had no war to fight, the island castle served as a residence and then as a prison, and it decayed through the seventeenth-century wars with Muscovy until only walls stood in the water. It was rebuilt between 1946 and 1961 to its fifteenth-century form, and now holds a museum.
The reconstruction is thorough enough that a visitor sees a completed medieval castle rather than a ruin — which is worth knowing when looking at photographs of it, because much of what stands is twentieth-century work on medieval foundations.