Międzyrzecz Castle

The Piast Castle in Międzyrzecz is a partially reconstructed complex of buildings, which consists of the main castle building, the building of starostwo with the outbuilding, the tavern, and the gate building. Currently, the Międzyrzecz Regional Museum is located in them. The castle gate, fortified with roundel bastions, is currently the only such preserved in Poland.

The castle in Międzyrzecz was founded in the times of King Casimir the Great and is the successor of a wooden borough located in this place earlier. Regular building, surrounded by walls built on earthen embankments, had outlasted until 1520, when it was burned by the Germans and then reconstructed for defensive purposes in a slightly modernized form. It was then in the 16th century that the castle was expanded by two powerful roundel bastions, which walls were 3.5 m thick, and the interior - 10 m in diameter.

On the ground floor of the bastion stands for artillery, and in its upper part for infantrymen were provided. Unfortunately, the period in which the fortifications were built was also associated with the intense development of armaments techniques, which is why the buildings were shortly used for defensive purposes, while the castle itself, conquered by the Swedes in the 17th century, was seriously ruined. An ineffective attempt to rebuild it took place in 1691 by starosta Piotr Opaliński and it was only in the 1950s that the castle was secured as a well preserved ruin.