The Palace in Vinnitsa

Like the other medieval towns, Vinnitsa began from the castle. In the middle of XIVth century, after the defeating the Jambolutska horde, the Lithuanian forces appeared on the territory of Podillia. The princes Koriatoviches in 1363 based a fortress Venitsa (Vinnitsa) on a Bug hills. The first (Lithuanian) castle towered in Vinnitsa near modern Old-town bridge. The certificates about this fortress can be found in the descriptions of the state auditors of XV-XVI centuries. It follows from them that the castle was small (24 x 20.25 sazhens), triangular and five-towered. The walls was double: one was made of oak, another was of rod on small distance from the first. The interval between walls was filled by the rammed ground with sand, a wooden parapet, named in the description the blanking, was throw above the walls. However the strengthenings was obvious deficient. In 1545 the auditor Lev Tishkevich wrote with sorrow, that the castle “is very small and is made of very thin tree… only holes and I don’t know such castles, which were made so simple as this”. Not much better was an arms. In the castle there were 2 guns, 20 “gakovnits”, 2 pishchals, 39 arkebuses. Their quality was such, that “it is dangerous to shoot”, because at a gun “the end blown up, filled by iron”. Here was the garrison of the groups of drabes (the Head Cossacks) and four “watch-and-call” men for the protection of the castle. The Vinnitsa castle had remote field guard: some horsemen patrolled in a mile from town, on the urochishche “Chotiri mogili” (“Four graves”). The first Vinnitsa fortress some times was destroyed and burned by the steppe neighbors. During 150 years the castle gone through the thirty sieges. The certificates about them remained in the medieval documents. The charter of the prince Svidrigaylo, dated by 1431, approves, that the Tatars killed the governor of province Bogdan Mikulinskiy “behind Braslavl… the castle in Vinnitsa, which they took, they burned”. The similar situations happened in 1524, 1541. In the middle of XVIth century, after the next raid, the castle was completely destroyed. Soon the second stage of the history of the Vinnitsa fortress began. The strengthenings are transferred upward against the current of Bug, to the small island Kempa. Here the Heads Bogush Koretskiy and Valentiy Kalinovskiy built the new castle and palace. In 1580 it was burned, but quickly was rebuilt. In 1598 the center of Bratslav province was transferred to Vinnitsa. With the construction on a right bank of Bug the strengthening complex of the Jesuit and Dominican monasteries (“Walls”), the castle on an island gradually stopped to be used on assignment. In XVII-XVIII centuries military actions practically didn’t hold in it (except for small episodes of times of the Liberation wars and a raids of the Haidamacks). The description of the castle of 1765 approves, that it “is located on an island, consists of the shaft, destroyed palace and kordegardion, castle and town connect by the bridge on chains”. In the description of 1789 it is any mention about palace, and in 1821 the researcher Marchinskiy wrote, that “anything remains from two Vinnitsa’s castles”.