Stołpie (Стовп'є)

Stołpie, recorded in medieval sources under the Cyrillic form Стовп’є, lies in the modern municipality of Stołpie in Poland and was created within the Old Rus’ polity of Volhynia. It first appears in regional affairs in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. The Galician–Volhynian Chronicle notes the site under the year 6712 (corresponding to 1208 or 1210) in an account of Kraków prince Leszek the White compelling Prince Oleksandr Vsevolodych to cede certain settlements, including Стовп’є, to Prince Vasilko Romanovych; those places were later retaken in 1217–1218 by Prince Danilo Romanovych. The place-name continues to occur intermittently in documents through the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

The stronghold was likely established as a border fortress between Volhynia and neighbouring Polish lands at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, during the rule of Prince Roman Mstyslavich. In the 1230s the complex underwent major rebuilding and for a time appears to have functioned as a fortified monastery. One hypothesis identifies the site with the monastery-residence of Roman Mstyslavich’s widow, Anna, who became a nun in the 1220s and died in 1253 or 1254. A further phase of construction began in the 1280s, when fortifications and buildings were enlarged amid renewed tensions within the Romanovych dynasty and with Polish princes. At the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a destructive fire damaged the complex, which was not rebuilt thereafter. Archaeological investigations carried out in 2003–2005 have helped to reconstruct the sequence of occupation and transformation at the site.