Old Grodno Castle

The Old Grodno Castle originated within the eleventh century as the seat of a dynasty of Black Ruthenian rulers, descended from a younger son of Yaroslav the Wise of Kiev. The thirteenth-century maintain of the castle belonged to a kind of Belarusian shielding tower represented by the Tower of Kamyanyets. Vytautas the Great brought five Brick Gothic towers in 1391–98, remodeling the citadel into one in every of his principal houses. Casimir IV Jagiellon additionally favoured Hrodna over Lithuania's official capital. It became there that the Polish Crown become offered to him, and it changed into there that he died in 1492.

The subsequent super tenant of the fortress changed into Stephen Bathory who envisaged Hrodna because the capital of his massive empire in Eastern Europe. He engaged Scotto of Parma to update the Vytautas Castle with his own residence inside the superior Renaissance flavor of Northern Italy. After Bathory's death in Hrodna in 1586, his pet undertaking become deserted. The castle become devastated by means of the Russians all through a Russo-Polish War in 1655.