Old Chortkiv Castle

The Old Chortkiv Castle was a fortification located in the town of Chortkiv, now part of modern Ukraine. It was constructed by the local defensive authorities to protect the settlement from military threats in the region.

The castle is first clearly documented on a map from the early 17th century created by Guillaume de Beauplan, a French cartographer known for his detailed representations of the lands of Eastern Europe. During this period, the fortress consisted of a square enclosure with round towers at each corner, designed to defend the town. However, by the start of the 1600s, it became evident that the castle’s defenses were outdated. Its rounded towers, known as rondells, had walls too thin to resist the increasing use of cannon fire, which could cause quick structural failures and weaken the defensive capability significantly.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the castle faced damage from ongoing conflicts in the region. The eastern tower, once a part of the castle’s fortified perimeter, likely sustained harm during these battles and ultimately disappeared by the mid-1700s. In the early 1700s, there was a shift in the use of the castle’s grounds. The Dominican religious order established a church and monastery within the castle’s former area. They constructed a surrounding defensive wall for this complex, repurposing materials from a nearby castle built in 1625 in Shmankivtsi village that had been dismantled.

During the 1720s and 1730s, the Dominicans undertook an extensive building project to establish a Baroque-style church and monastery, which effectively led to the old fortress’s destruction. Despite protests from conservationists in the Eastern Galicia region, concerned about preserving the castle’s remains, the construction progressed. Recent research carried out in 2017, commissioned by the Dominican Order, confirmed that remnants of defensive walls originally protecting the castle remain incorporated around the Dominican complex.