Panemunė Castle

Panemunė Castle is home to the Vilnius Academy of Arts museum and art gallery, a guest house and a restaurant. Baltic tribes have lived on the banks of the Nemunas since ancient times: Sudovians and Yotvingians, Scalovians and Aukštaitians, Samogitians and Curonians. Later, during the wars against the Teutonic Knights, the river banks became especially important to the emerging Lithuanian state: a continuous system of defensive castles held back the Order's raids and made it hard to penetrate deep into the country. It is believed that the manor of Grand Duke Vytenis may have stood on the grounds of Panemunė Castle, and that this famous ruler of Lithuania was buried here. According to legend, Vytenis died in 1315 while attacking the Teutonic castle of Christmemel, which stood near present-day Skirsnemunė. In the Romantic era, two mounds raised in the castle park came to be called the graves of Duke Vytenis and his wife. The Panemunė Castle that now stands on the upper terrace of the right bank of the Nemunas was built later, after the era of wars against the Teutonic Order had ended. Even so, it was destined to witness many important events in the history of the state. In the 16th century, this was the site of the Panemunė manor of the nobleman Stanislovas Stankevičius-Bielevičius, chamberlain of Samogitia. In 1597 it was bought by Janusz Eperjesz, a nobleman of Hungarian origin who had come to Lithuania during the reign of Stephen Báthory and quickly became involved in Lithuania's political and economic life. In place of the old wooden manor buildings, he planned to build a brick residential castle. Construction is believed to have begun in 1604 to the designs of Peter Nonhart, an architect of Dutch origin and one of the most renowned architects working in Lithuania at the time. At the beginning of the 17th century the palace of the Lower Castle in Vilnius was also being rebuilt to his design, commissioned by the grand dukes. In Panemunė, two two-storey palace wings were built on a high natural hill: the eastern residential wing and the northern utility wing. To the south and west they were joined by high defensive walls with four-storey towers at the south-eastern and south-western corners (only the south-western tower, raised in the mid-17th century, survives today). The castle buildings surrounded a trapezoid-shaped inner courtyard. Archaeologists have found that the foundations of the eastern wing are two metres deep, and on them the outer walls, almost a metre thick, were laid using Renaissance brick bonding. A park adjoined the castle on the south side, towards the Nemunas. In the eastern part of the southern wall there was a two-storey brick Renaissance arcade, and beyond it an exit into the park framed by an ornate surround. The lingering influence of the Gothic tradition alongside Renaissance defensive architecture can be seen in the portal of the main entrance to the palace, decorated with a pointed arch. The restrained exterior concealed luxuriously furnished interiors. Their artistic appearance can only be judged from archaeological finds, the most impressive of which are fragments of ornamented tiles decorated with coats of arms. After J. Eperjesz's death the castle passed to his three sons, Christopher, George and John, and later to one of them, Christopher Eperjesz, steward of the Kaunas district. Archaeological excavations suggest that the castle was reconstructed in 1649: the position, size and shape of most windows and doors were changed, and the main entrance to the eastern wing was framed with a rectangular portal considerably wider than the former Gothic one. The palace thus acquired Mannerist or early Baroque elements, and the rebuilt arcade gained Baroque features. The new owner moved the living and representative rooms from the eastern wing to the southern one and also built the north-western and north-eastern towers (only the former survives). Unlike the others, the north-eastern tower was hexagonal, and K. Eperjesz set up the family chapel in it. Despite the Baroque elements, the castle's plan and architecture remained Renaissance. Having belonged to the Eperjesz family for about 150 years, the castle was sold in 1753 to Baron Colonel Leon Igelström, elder of Gulbinai. Six years later (1759) he sold the property for 19,000 thalers to Antanas Gelgaudas, elder of Akmenė and standard-bearer of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The new owner rebuilt the neglected castle. On the second floor of the south-western tower, three windows were cut in place of the embrasures and a library was set up. New cylindrical stoves of white tiles were built in the southern part of the building, and the representative rooms were decorated with friezes of classical figures. Through the new windows one could see the beautifully landscaped park: a stream was dammed to form five ponds, mounds for relaxation were raised, and gazebos, an orangery and a so-called menagerie, an enclosure for fallow deer, were built. This shows that the park's creators followed the then widespread principles of Classicist and early Romantic landscape aesthetics. When A. Gelgaudas died in 1795, the castle passed to his son Mykolas Gelgaudas, former Marshal of the Court of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and in 1828 to Mykolas's wife Eleonora Gelgaudienė and their children Antanas and Jonas. Both sons were active participants in the 1831 Uprising. Antanas Gelgaudas, a general of the Polish army, became the commander-in-chief of the uprising in Lithuania. In May 1831 he arrived from Užnemunė with 16,000 soldiers, crossed the Nemunas near Gelgaudiškis and set up camp not far from his family estate. From here the insurgents under his command began their fight in Lithuania. Sadly, when the insurgents were defeated, A. Gelgaudas failed to retreat in time and was killed. His brother J. Gelgaudas, who had also taken part in the uprising and had been looking after the castle, fled to Prussia. For their part in the uprising both brothers were declared state criminals, their castle was ravaged, damaged and plundered, and in 1832 it was confiscated by the Tsarist authorities. Only in 1867 did Stanislovas Puslovskis, a landowner and heir to the Gelgaudas estate, take over the castle and manor, but he could no longer restore and maintain the huge residence: the western wing was turned into a granary, the eastern wing almost collapsed, and around 1919 the north-eastern tower fell down. In 1925 the manor was expropriated by the Lithuanian state. In 1935 the castle was handed over to the Archaeological Commission of the Ministry of Education. Since then it has been managed by various cultural and educational institutions. Uninhabited and neglected, the castle was rarely rebuilt, so its architecture has changed relatively little to this day. Architecturally, it is now the most authentic Lithuanian residential castle of the 17th–18th centuries. Of the castle's four wings, three survive: the oldest, eastern wing, the southern wing, which was the most important in the 18th century, and the western wing. Two of the castle's original four towers stand at the corners of the latter. On the site of the northern wing, the cellars of this part of the building have been cleared and restored. In 1961 Panemunė Castle was added to the list of Lithuanian architectural monuments. Since 1982 Panemunė Castle has belonged to the Vilnius Academy of Arts.