Minsk Castle
wooden defensive structure in Minsk
The Minsk Castle (Belarusian: Мінскі замак, romanized: Minski zamak) was a wooden defensive structure in Minsk, built in the mid-11th century on the right bank of the Svislach river at its confluence with the Nyamiha river (in the area of March 8 Square); destroyed in the early 19th century, and ultimately leveled by the Soviet authorities in the 1950s. The area formerly surrounded by castle ramparts received the name Zamczysko.
Research status
The Minsk Castle was built on a natural island where the Nyamiha river flows into the Svislach river. The Nyamiha river has survived to this day in the form of a small stream, enclosed in concrete collectors. The castle grounds were located near the present-day March 8 Square. Currently, the Victors Avenue runs alongside it.
Mentions of the Minsk Castle include notes from the Moscow merchant Trifon Korobeynikov from 1593 and correspondence between Tsar Alexis of Russia and the Moscow voivodes appointed by him for the Lithuanian cities during the Russo-Polish War of 1654–1667. Plans of the castle from the 18th to 19th centuries have been preserved, marking the location of fragments of the rampart. In the 1950s, before the construction of the Park Avenue thoroughfare (now Victors Avenue), traces of the old street system were visible.
Archaeological excavations on the site of today's March 8 Square, located on a small hill measuring 75×45 meters, began in the mid-20th century.
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This entry incorporates text from “Minsk Castle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.