Kamianets-Podilskyi Fortress

One bridge is the only dry way in: 88m long and, at its highest, 27m above the floor of the ravine. The rest was done by the river. The Smotrych loops almost the whole way round the limestone peninsula that Kamianets-Podilskyi stands on, and the castle holds the single neck of rock the water left uncut.

Rus princes, Lithuanian dukes, Polish kings, an Ottoman sultan and Russian emperors held it in turn. It came third in the 2007 public vote for the Seven Wonders of Ukraine, and it now anchors a state museum-reserve.

The river did most of the fortifying

The Old Castle covers a little over a hectare and a half. On three sides the ground simply stops, so the canyon does the work of a moat and the walls, towers and gate are packed onto the one approach: whoever wanted the town came along that saddle, uphill and in view.

Behind the stone castle stands a blunter, later one. Between 1617 and 1621, for Sigismund III Vasa, the engineer Teofil Szomberg cut a hornwork across the exposed western side: earth ramparts, two semi-bastions about 16m high, a deep ditch. The New Castle was built to absorb artillery, not to repel ladders.

1672, and twenty-seven Ottoman years

Timber came first, under Kyivan Rus, and burned often enough that stone was replacing it by the 13th century. It did not save the town from the Mongols in 1240. Lithuanian princes rebuilt from the mid-14th century; the Polish Crown then held it until 1793 and did most of the building you walk through.

Then August 1672. Mehmed IV brought an army up the Dnister, and the city everyone called impregnable surrendered on the 18th after a siege measured in days. Podillia became an Ottoman province governed from Kamianets for the next twenty-seven years, until the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. The Turks left something visible from the walls: a 36.5m minaret beside the cathedral in the Old Town. The handover terms forbade pulling it down, so the returning Poles set a gilded Virgin on top, and there she remains.

Under the Russian Empire it became a border post, then a jail for debtors, criminals and political prisoners from 1816 to 1914. In 1919, with Kyiv lost, the town served as the last capital of the Ukrainian People's Republic.

Reading the towers

Eleven towers ring the Old Castle; older lists count twelve, of which seven survive intact. Each has a name and a date, so the circuit doubles as a chronology of fortification.

The Papal Tower is square, 10m to a side and 28m tall on its southern face. Pope Julius II paid for the modernisation King Alexander Jagiellon began between 1503 and 1513, and the della Rovere arms are still cut into its eastern wall. Ustym Karmeliuk, the Podillian outlaw, was shut in here from 1818 and broke out with companions in 1823; it has been the Karmeliuk Tower ever since.

The White Tower, the Lyaska, was the local clergy's strongroom, and the line carved over its door observes that a true friend turns up more rarely than the phoenix. The Black Tower held powder and the castle well — 40m down, worked by wooden wheels about 4.5m across. Two cannonballs are shown mortared into the masonry where they struck.

The sultan who turned back

The best-known story here belongs to a different sultan. Osman II is said to have brought his army under these walls in the early 1620s, asked whose hands had built the place, been told that God had built it, and turned the march around: God could take it back himself. Kamianets fell to Mehmed IV half a century later; even so, in eight centuries it was stormed only twice, which is what the legend is really about.

What the reserve puts on

The weapons room holds cannon, culverins and falconets; a second display is given over to the town executioner, a post Kamianets was one of only three Ukrainian towns to keep. Costumed programmes run through the season: an evening walk through the Old Castle's legends, pottery on the wheel, bread baked in an old oven, along with a mock ‘wedding for a day’ that people book in earnest.

Ruthenica brings knightly reenactment, The Last Capital marks the UNR years each August, Respublika brings music. The one worth timing a trip to is the balloon festival at the end of May, when dozens lift off over the Smotrych canyon.

Getting there, and how long to give it

Kamianets-Podilskyi sits on the rail line from Kyiv towards Chernivtsi, with direct buses from Kyiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Chernivtsi and Ivano-Frankivsk; by road, Zhytomyr and Khmelnytskyi from Kyiv, Ternopil from Lviv. The fortress is inside the town, walkable from the Old Town over the castle bridge.

The reserve opens daily from 9am, with no closing day. A combined ticket adding the town hall, art gallery and antiquities museum beats buying them separately, and a guide from the ticket desk is worth it. Give the castle and the Old Town most of a day. Stairs, uneven stone and unfenced drops mean proper shoes and a hand on small children; in summer the courtyards bake, so carry water. Khotyn fortress is 25km off, which puts two of the Seven Wonders into one day; Bakota, the Atlantyda cave and the Dnister canyon are all within easy reach.