Nesvizh Castle
Radziwill family palace on a moated island, a UNESCO site with thirty restored period interiors.
Mikalaj Krysztof Radziwill the Orphan began the present palace in 1583, employing the Italian Jesuit architect Giovanni Maria Bernardoni. Built on an island ringed by earth bastions and water, it replaced an earlier wooden stronghold and became the seat of one of the most powerful magnate families in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Successive rebuildings gave the ranges a Baroque and later a Classicist character, so that the courtyard now shows several centuries of work side by side.
The Radziwills left in 1939 and the palace served for decades as a sanatorium before conservation work began. It reopened as part of the National Historical and Cultural Museum-Reserve Nesvizh, and about thirty rooms have been fitted out as they might have looked in the family's day, among them the Golden, Hunting and Hetman halls. UNESCO inscribed the architectural, residential and cultural complex in 2005. The site also covers a landscaped park, the Slutsk Gates and the Corpus Christi Church.
Highlights
- Some thirty restored state rooms including the Golden and Hunting halls
- Island setting with bastions, moat and 19th-century landscape park
- Corpus Christi Church, burial place of the Radziwill family
- UNESCO World Heritage inscription made in 2005
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