Gediminas Tower (Zamek Górny w Wilnie)

Zamek Górny w Wilnie stands on Gediminas Hill in the municipality of Vilnius, Lithuania, and was built by the medieval Lithuanians of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Stone defenses appear on the hill in records from the first half of the 14th century, replacing an earlier wooden stronghold. In that century Grand Duke Gediminas had a masonry fortress erected on the site. During the late 14th and early 15th centuries the fortress endured repeated attacks by the Teutonic Knights, with sieges recorded in 1365, 1375, 1377, 1383, 1390, 1392, 1394 and 1402; the 1394 assault reportedly lasted three weeks.

A major conflagration in 1419 led Grand Duke Vytautas to rebuild the castle in brick Gothic between 1419 and 1422. The rebuilt complex later served military and civic roles. From the reign of Alexander Jagiellon the site contained an armory and a foundry for artillery, and it also housed a prison; in the 1500s the castle was used specifically to detain members of the nobility. Sigismund II Augustus renewed the Castle House and installed a library there.

The fortress suffered during the Moscow invasion of 1655–1661. In 1661 a Russian garrison under Daniło Myszecki occupied the castle and surrendered it to King Jan Kazimierz on 3 December 1661; Myszecki was later executed in the city. By the end of the 18th century the southern tower had been partly taken down and the western tower reduced in height.

In 1830 work raised the surviving western tower by adding a wooden four-sided superstructure, a feature later removed around 1930 by Polish conservators. After military withdrawal and formal liquidation of the fortress in 1878 the hill was opened to civilians and a winding path up the slope was laid in the 1890s. Polish conservators reconstructed one floor of the western tower in 1938–1939. On 20 September 1939 Soviet forces removed the Polish flag from the tower; a Lithuanian flag was placed there on 27 October 1939. On 13 July 1944 members of the Polish Home Army briefly raised a Polish flag that was soon replaced by a Soviet flag.

World War II caused heavy damage to the western tower. The structure was rebuilt between 1956 and 1960 during the Soviet period for use as the Vilnius Castle Museum. For the 750th anniversary of Mindaugas’s coronation in 2003 a funicular was installed to provide access to the tower. Archaeological investigations and conservation work have taken place in multiple campaigns since the 1930s, and in early 2017 excavators found the grave of Polish general Zygmunt Sierakowski on the north slope. Between 2013 and 2016 trees on the hill were cleared to make the castle remains more visible, and press reports noted concerns about slope stability as construction equipment appeared on the summit by 2019.