Dubingiai Castle Site (Castle Hill) and Dubingiai Bridge

On a peninsula of the breathtakingly beautiful Lake Asveja rises Castle Hill, where the once-important Dubingiai Castle stood. Lake Asveja is distinguished by its deeply indented shores framed by forested hills, reflected in the clear water of the lake. From the top of Castle Hill the beauty of Asveja takes your breath away; all that remains is to enjoy and admire the spine-tingling views. The hill's history is no less significant. In the Middle Ages this was not a peninsula, as it is today, but an island, on which a wooden castle is thought to have stood from at least the first half of the 14th century, guarding Vilnius from the north against raids by the Livonian Order. In the 15th century Grand Duke Vytautas himself saw to the construction of a new brick Dubingiai Castle. It later passed to one of the most famous noble families of Lithuania, the Radziwiłłs. In 1547–1548 the famous Barbara Radziwiłł lived in the castle for five months. In the Radziwiłł era an Evangelical Reformed church stood on a neighbouring hill near the palace. The castle crypts in which the Radziwiłłs were buried have now been discovered and excavated, and can be visited. The crypts have been conserved and protected from the elements by a special building erected over them. Rebuilt several times since Vytautas's day, the palace had several storeys, a tall tower and cellars. One cellar held beer and food supplies, another the treasury. Interesting and rare archaeological finds were made here too: a bone chess piece from Vytautas's time and a 17th-century stemless glass goblet. The palace resembled other Radziwiłł buildings of the time in Nesvizh, Vilnius and, somewhat later, Kėdainiai. Around the 18th century the castle site fell into decay and was abandoned, but as late as 1872 ruins still stood on the hill, captured in a drawing by the artist Napoleon Orda. One of the routes to Castle Hill crosses the lake via an engineering monument – the wooden Dubingiai Bridge, built in 1934 on the initiative of the then President Antanas Smetona himself.