Five hundred years, one family.
The 1108 Stronghold
Świny enters the written record in 1108, in a chronicle entry that makes it the oldest stronghold on the Trail of the Four Castles. The castle stands on a hill of porphyry, volcanic rock nearly three hundred million years old, in the heart of the Land of Extinct Volcanoes. From the thirteenth century the hill belonged to the Świnka family, later von Schweinichen, whose boar crest still watches over the gate. They held it until the eighteenth century: one family, one rock, five hundred years.
Tower, Walls and Hard Centuries
In the fourteenth century the old wooden fortifications gave way to a stone residential-defensive tower, the heart of the castle you climb today. Later generations wrapped it in walls, bastions and a drawbridge, and finally in a Renaissance-Baroque palace. The castle resisted the Hussites, survived the Thirty Years War, and was damaged by Russian troops in the eighteenth century. Abandoned by its owners, it burned in the great fire of 1876, and the twentieth century passed it by almost entirely.
The Legend of Georg
Every castle needs one story told with a smile, and Świny's is Georg von Schweinichen, a sixteenth-century gentleman of this house. He studied in Wittenberg, traveled to Jerusalem, served the emperor, and won his place in legend at the table: after twenty bottles of wine, he reportedly finished the evening with a horse bucket of the same. Restoration work today is bringing the castle back piece by piece: exhibitions, the residential tower, the cellars and bastions are open, and tournaments, festivals and night tours fill the calendar. Outside the walls, the castle church keeps a wooden baptismal font from 1628.
