Today, the village of White Stone in Lviv region attracts tourists with its Renaissance church, but few people know that once there was a fortified castle, built by a native of Vyshnevetsky. This fortress was once impressed by the scale, architectural sophistication and status of its owners.
The construction of the castle was started in 1611 by Prince Yuri Vyshnevetsky, a representative of the ancient Russian family, who, for his career in the Commonwealth, went into Catholicism. The estate later moved to his nephew of Yarema Vyshnevetsky - one of the most affluent magnates of that day. It was with his participation that the castle reached the heyday.
There is a legend that it was in this castle on July 31, 1640 that the son of Yarema was born - Mikhail Vyshnevetsky, who later became the king of the Commonwealth. The estate, which was not ashamed to accept the Polish kings, had a strategic location near the Western Bug, and around the castle were an artificial lake, a park, ditches with water and powerful shafts.
An architecturally castle was built in a Renaissance style - a rectangular shape with octagonal towers at every corner, a white stone portal, arcade in the inner yard, carving on windows and doors. The premises were located in the attached palace and in the thickness of the lower tier.
After the Vyshnevets Castle, he moved to the Radziwill family, but the absence of heirs led to its sale. The new owners had neither money nor interest in keeping the fortress. The castle began to decline in the eighteenth century. With the arrival of the Austrian authorities, some of the walls were dismantled, and the stone was used for the construction of a sugar mill and breweries.
The final blow was struck by the Soviet authorities, which destroyed the remains of the structure for the organization in its place of the collective farm. To this day, no tower or wall has been preserved, only photos of ruins taken by local historian Meczyslaw Orlovich in 1919.
Architectural studies suggest that the style of the castle in white stone could be similar to the preserved castle in Baran Sandomirsky, because they were built at the same time and belonged to relatives.
