Medzhybych Fortress - Castles on Waymarking.com

Medzhybych Fortress

The town of Medzhybych is first mentioned in the Rus’ Chronicles in 1146 as belonging to Prince Sviatoslav II of Kyiv. A wooden fortress would have been built between the Southern Buh and Buzhok rivers (thus the name which means “between the Buh Rivers.”). The fortress was destroyed by the invading Mongolian hordes in 1255.

In 1362, Prince Algirdas of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania defeated the Tatars, descendants of the Mongolian Golden Horde, in the Battle of Blue Waters in the Southern Bug basin and forced the Tatars to move their capital to Crimea. Algirdas built a fortress at Medzhybych to defend the strategic turn of two of the most important trading routes in the region – Chorny (Black) and Kuchmansky – which connected Moscow with Constantinople. With control of these trade routes he launched two unsuccessful invasions of Moscow itself. The Tatars would continue to attack Medzhybych until the early 17th Century.

In 1563 Mykola Sieniawski was rewarded for his service to the Polish and Lithuanian crown and was promoted to Grand Crown Hetman, commander in chief of the Polish army. He was given Medzhybych and built the fortress and church in 1568 whose ruins are what are seen today. The church was destroyed by the Soviets in 1959 and its stones used in building roads. The painting fragments inside the church from this period were rescued before its destruction and can be seen inside the church under restoration.

The earliest census of Medzhybych was taken in 1571 with 160 residents – 95 Ruthenians (Ukrainians), 35 Jews, and 30 Poles. By 1593 Adam Sieniawski granted the town Magdeburg rights and it began to grow into the most significant city in Podilya. In 1600 a Dominican Church was built nearby the fortress (the Soviets would blow it up in 1965). By 1648 the population had grown to 12,000 residents including 2,500 Jews. It was that year that the Cossack forces of Bogdan Khmelnitsky captured the town three times. The Cossacks massacred the Jewish population in the first extermination of Jews that occurred in Medzhybych. Accounts of pregnant Jewish women being sliced open alive and then forced to watch the death of their unborn and other atrocities were commonplace in the Cossack pogroms.

Weakened by the Cossack uprising, Podilya was invaded by the Ottoman Turks in 1672 that conquered and controlled the region until the Polish-Turkish war ended in 1699 and Podilya was back in the hands of Poland. The last Sieniawski died without an heir and the town and fortress was given to the Czartoryski family – the richest family in Poland – in 1731.

In 1792 the Second Partition of Poland found Medzhybych part of the Russian Empire, but the Czartoryski family was allowed to maintain their holdings until the November 1830 Uprising when former Polish and Lithuanian regions tried to break free from the Russian yoke. Adam Czartoryski, who participated in the rebellion, was forced into exile in 1831. Russia then moved the seat of power for Podilya from Medzhybych to Kamyanets-Podilsky.

The two World Wars were hard on the town. German and Hungarian forces occupied the town after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Medzhybych became the scene of many pogroms during the ensuing Russian Civil War (1917-1922) until the Soviet Union was able to take control. The Nazi took the town on July 8, 1941 and turned it into a Jewish ghetto. The Jewish population initially survived the Final Solution longer than other towns in Ukraine because they were slave laborers for an important road building project. But eventually all 2558 Jews were executed in three mass shootings in the Fall of 1942.

In October 2008 Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko ordered the creation of a memorial to the victims of the Holodomor within the fortress walls. The Holodomor was a man-made famine created by the Soviet Bolshevik regime between 1932 and 1933 as part of their genocide program to wipe out the Ukrainian middle-class. A minimum of eight million Ukrainians died of starvation as their food was stolen by Soviet authorities and shipped up north to Russia. The number killed far surpassed the Nazi slaughter of Jews and other “undesirables”, but little is mentioned of this atrocity in history books. This museum is a first step in making this genocide known to the world.

Accessibility: Full access Condition: Partly ruined Admission Charge?: yes Website: Not listed

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