While using this application, you will learn many new and inspiring stories about the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the city of Trakai with its castles, where the Trakai History Museum is located! The inventive and clever guide will accompany you throughout the journey of time, anticipate questions, provide knowledge and further awaken curiosity, inviting you to visit it again.
Maybe you will be surprised to learn that during the Middle Ages three castles were associated with the name of Trakai? All made of bricks, all surrounded by water – natural water bodies and artificially formed canals. Now we call them the castles of Old Trakai, Trakai Peninsula and Trakai Island.
The learning begins with the third, most famous and best extant – the gothic Island Castle. The island of the castle was formed artificially by connecting three individuals, separated peat-bog, swampy lake and coastal water islands. The convent-type ducal palace, with its tallest (33 meters high) tower called a donjon and defensive supporting walls forming a terrace, has two floors, with basements and a defensive attic. The residential floors are surrounded by wooden galleries. From them the door leads to the nine halls where the duke’s family, suite and guests lived, and to the grand, or representative, hall occupying the entire floor. In the basement below it was a kitchen and on the opposite side, in the basement of the other building, a treasury. Located in the basements air heating kindling’s are visible from the yard and the remnants of polychrome paintings can be found everywhere on the original plaster in the castle.
The exposition of the Trakai History Museum begins in the left wing, in the so-called “Vytautasˮ halls, where the Grand Duke and his wife are believed to have stayed. In the showcases displayed archaeological finds – chessmen, Venetian glass shards, multi-coloured glaze tiles – testify that in the 15th century the castle was ornately and luxuriously furnished, where various types of entertainment, celebrations and consecrations to knights took place. The barbs of crossbows – a common finding of the archaeologists – speak of intense fighting. Even more examples of different historical armaments can be seen in the showcases of the exhibition, while listening to the in-depth and informative narration of this application. Occupying the entire first floor of the right wing the grand, or representative, hall is the most important and ornate room of the castle. The fact that in the 15th and 16th centuries the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was by its territory the largest state in Europe is proved by ancient cartographers created maps and the beauty of the city of Trakai and the castles is depicted in historical engravings and paintings. The history of the restoration of the 20th century Island Castle is briefly presented: the stained-glass windows, as well as some other architectural solutions (floor tiles, wooden gallery patterns) were stylized according to the early Gothic analogues while restoring.
Every year, the modernizing Trakai History Museum pays a lot of attention to interactive entertainment and various types of education, constantly organizes interesting exhibitions and events or renews permanent expositions. Our goal – an interesting, lively, constantly changing museum.
We invite you to visit again and again. Let us become good friends!
