Ortelsburg

The castle of Ortelsburg (Polish Zamek w Szczytnie) stands on the isthmus between the lakes Domowe Duże and Domowe Małe in the town of Szczytno (German Ortelsburg), Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, in the Masurian region of north-eastern Poland. Between about 1350 and 1360 Ortulf von Trier, Grand Hospitaller of the Teutonic Order and commander of Elbing, founded a wooden fort in former Galindian land; a document of September 1360 names Heinrich Murer as pfleger zu Ortelspurg. The German name Ortulfsburg, later Ortelsburg, comes from Ortulf; Masovian settlers called the place Szczytno after the Latin lake names Sciten.

Lithuanians under Kęstutis burned the timber castle in 1370. A brick convent-type castle followed: a four-winged square of about 39 metres on each side, three storeys, wings some 11 metres wide, fieldstone and brick up to the main floor, and a 9 × 9 metre tower at the south-west corner. Ditches and earthworks enclosed the site; a southern economic bailey faced the narrowing between the lakes. After Grunwald in 1410 local knights and then Polish forces briefly held it; Władysław Jagiełło granted it to Duke Siemowit of Masovia, but the Order recovered it the same year. In the Thirteen Years’ War a Polish garrison occupied it 1454–55. After the Second Peace of Thorn (1466) it remained in the Teutonic state; after secularisation in 1525 it became the seat of ducal starosts and lost its role as a border fortress.

Margrave George Frederick of Ansbach had it rebuilt in 1579–81 by Blasius Berwart and Hans Wismar as a hunting residence with painted interiors. Later it served as magazine and arsenal. The east wing was demolished between 1766 and 1792; the rest decayed. Only foundations and low wall remains survive beside the town hall on Plac Juranda.