Voruta

Voruta is located in Anykščiai municipality, Lithuania, and was erected by the medieval Lithuanian polity during the thirteenth century.

The name Voruta appears in the Ipatiev Chronicle under the year 1251, which records that King Mindaugas defended himself there during a civil war against his nephews Tautvilas and Edivydas and against the duke of Samogitia, Vykintas. Other medieval mentions refer simply to a castle belonging to Mindaugas without giving a name or clear place, so the single 1251 entry is the principal recorded association of the site with Mindaugas and that conflict.

Archaeological investigation links human use of the place to two main spans. Occupation stretches from the second half of the thirteenth century through to the end of the fourteenth century. The hillfort appears to have been abandoned during the fourteenth century and then reconstructed at the close of that century, with renewed use in the early years of the fifteenth century. During the first half of the fifteenth century the lord’s residence reportedly moved to the nearby Anykščiai castle, while a village of serfs remained beside the hill and its burial ground continued in use until the eighteenth century. In 1910 Jonas Basanavičius examined twenty-six graves from that cemetery, which dated to the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

In 1923 relocation of the village and cultivation of the hill caused notable damage to buried fortifications and structures. From 1988 onward local volunteers carried out clean-up work, formal archaeological research began in 1990, and plans to rebuild a wooden castle emerged in 1997. A 1999 decree authorized works for a wooden reconstruction, a bridge over the Varelis stream was begun in October 2000 and opened on 6 July 2001, and a modern timber reconstruction was erected on the site. At least sixteen different places in Lithuania and Belarus have been proposed as Voruta since the late nineteenth century, and an alternative interpretation holds that the word voruta may have originally been a general term for “castle” rather than the name of a single fortress. The modern wooden structure built on the hill is one of the largest reconstructions of its kind in Eastern Europe and stands where the archaeological remains were investigated.