Khotyn Fortress

In September 1621 Sultan Osman II brought some 160,000 men, more than 300 cannon and a train of camels and war elephants to the ground below Khotyn's walls. Five weeks later he rode away without the fortress. Within a year his own janissaries had deposed and killed him.

Khotyn stands on the right bank of the Dnister in Chernivtsi Oblast, grey limestone lifting straight out of the slope above the water. For eight centuries it was the lock on the middle Dnister crossing, held in turn by Rus princes, Moldavian voivodes, Ottoman sultans, Polish kings and Russian emperors. It is a state reserve now, one of the Seven Wonders of Ukraine, and the nearest thing Ukrainian cinema has to a permanent medieval back lot.

Why they built here

The main wall runs to about 40m at its highest, with five to six metres of masonry at the base. Khotyn changed hands often, but the claim repeated on site is that no army ever took it by direct assault — only by starving it out or agreeing terms. The stone came late to a spot that already mattered: a ford crossed the middle Dnister here, so whoever held the crossing held the road into the region.

Eight centuries of changing hands

The first fort was timber, raised more than a thousand years ago and ringed with an earth rampart once Volodymyr the Great brought these lands into Kyivan Rus. Stone came under Danylo of Halych in the 1240s and 1250s, though the oldest mortar hints at earlier work.

What you walk through today is mostly Moldavian. Khotyn served as a residence of the voivodes of Moldavia from the 14th to the 16th century, and Stephen III the Great oversaw the rebuild himself: five towers, a courtyard floor raised a full ten metres, and the space divided between the Princely Court and a separate Soldiers' Court.

1621, and the sultan who lost his throne here

Moldavia slid into Ottoman vassalage around 1500 and a Turkish garrison moved in. In 1621 a combined Cossack, Polish and Lithuanian force under Petro Sahaidachny and Jan Karol Chodkiewicz held the camp below these walls against an army several times its size, from early September to 9 October. Chodkiewicz died mid-siege; Sahaidachny took a wound that killed him within months. The elephants, sent forward late as a shock weapon, made no impression on Cossacks who had been raiding Ottoman territory for years.

On 11 November 1673 Jan Sobieski beat the Ottomans here again, and the victory carried him to the Polish throne the following spring. Between 1711 and 1718 the Turks brought in French engineers and wrapped the castle in a second, far larger ring built for the age of artillery: the New Fortress, earth ramparts and angled bastions big enough for twenty thousand men. The wooden bridges at the southern gate belong to that rebuild.

Inside the Old Castle

The wall carries decoration, rare on a working fortress: geometric bands of red brick laid into the grey stone. The courtyard behind it is a small settlement, with the church of Saints Constantine and Helena at its centre — 13th century in origin, a mosque under the Turks before the Orthodox rite returned. The castle sits on rock, so the well had to go down more than sixty metres through stone to reach water.

Four towers frame the Old Castle. The Northern is reckoned the oldest — tradition gives it to Danylo of Halych — and the red brickwork gives it away. The Blacksmith's is what it sounds like; the Commandant's was the garrison chief's office. The Eastern one is the Tower of the Condemned, and the name is literal: prisoners and intruders went off a top standing almost forty-five metres above the ground.

Find the damp patch on the wall too. Some see a jug in its outline, others a map of Ukraine. One story has a girl shot by an archer as she carried water to the besieged; a darker one has a commandant walling up his own daughter. Chemists blame saltpetre leaching out of old gunpowder.

La Rochelle on the Dnister

Film crews have been borrowing these walls since the 1960s, usually to play somewhere else: Zakhar Berkut (1971), The Arrows of Robin Hood (1975), The Old Fortress (1976), D'Artagnan and Three Musketeers (1978) and Taras Bulba (2009). Khotyn has stood in for French and English castles more often than for itself — in the musketeers series it is La Rochelle. The Medieval Khotyn festival, several days around the May holidays, is the fortress playing itself: reenactor camps, armoured mass fights and a staged assault on the walls.

Getting there, and what else is close

Without a car, take a train to Chernivtsi or Kamianets-Podilskyi and a bus on to Khotyn; by road it is signposted from Kamianets-Podilskyi, 25km away. That proximity puts two of the Seven Wonders inside one day, and Zhvanets castle's ruins are closer still.

The reserve opens daily from 9am, until 6pm in the warm months and 5pm through the winter. Entry is ticketed and a guide costs extra — take one, the walls do not explain themselves. Museum displays fill the cellars of the old barracks: weapons, clay pipes, coins, an exhibition on the 1621 war. Wear shoes you can cross uneven stone in, allow two hours, and in summer bring a hat and water — the open courtyards hold the heat.