Krzyżtopór Castle in Ujazd - once the largest palace complex in Europe

The owners enjoyed their new premises only for a short time. The owner died a year after the construction was completed, in 1645, while his heir and only son, Krzysztof Baldwin, died in 1949 at the battle of Zborow. Since then, the castle has passed from hand to hand several times.

The castle in Krzyżtopór is a typical example of a palazzo in Fortezza, a mixture of a presidential palazzo and a fortress. Inspired by Italian palaces, it is as magnificent as it is rich.

The construction plan consists of a bastion inscribed in a pentagon with axes of about 120 m and 95 m. The palace, fortifications and garden are connected axially. The shape of the building was designed on a pentagonal base, modelled on the number of calendar days. Four towers reflect the four seasons, the number of rooms corresponds to the number of weeks in a year, with rooms for each month, and the number of windows corresponds to the number of days in a year.

In the center there is a three-story palace built on a rectangular plan with an elliptical inner courtyard. A wing with a large hall on the first floor, topped with an octagonal tower, was added to the main body of the palace, on the axis from the north-western side. The side wings of the palace surrounded the large entrance courtyard.

Through the glass ceiling in the dining room in the tower, visitors could see an aquarium with exotic fish.

The stable on the right side of the castle has excellent acoustic conditions admired by the specialists who proposed to the owners of the castle to organize concerts there. It is said that the horses living there had crystal mirrors in their stables and their mangers were made of marble.

The basement of the tower hides a spring with water of extraordinary taste and healing qualities called Krzyztopożanka.

This once the largest palace building in Europe occupies 1.3 hectares. The gardens occupy an area of 1.6 ha.

The total length of the walls is 600 meters and their area is 3730 square meters. The castle is surrounded by a 3-metre-high rampart. It is 5-7 meters high outside, and even 15 meters by the northern bastion. <11 thousand tons of quartzite sandstone, 300 cubic meters of kunov sandstone, 5 thousand cubic meters of sand, marble, alabaster and exotic wood were used for construction. 200,000 bricks and 30,000 tiles were needed for the construction, 1 million egg whites were used for the mortar.

The castle was robbed and destroyed during the Swedish invasion in 1655. At that time, numerous archives containing, among others, documentation related to the construction of the palace were destroyed. The family stayed in the palace and lived in one of the wings, because it was too expensive to rebuild the castle.