Pishchalauski Castle

Minsk, Belarus, Belarus

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Pishchalauski Castle, also spelled Pischalauski Castle and often called the “Belarusian Bastille,” is a imposing 19th-century fortress-prison in central Minsk, Belarus, built in 1825 on Romanovsky Hill and designed in a retrospective castle style with neoclassical elements. Although commonly linked to the landowner Rudolf Pishchalo, the name comes from him as the contractor while the actual architect was Mikhail Chakhovsky or Kazimir Chrzczonowicz depending on sources, and the rectangular three-storey building with four corner towers was conceived as a modern stone prison to replace an older wooden one. Since its opening, the castle has functioned almost exclusively as a place of detention: in the 19th century it held participants of the Polish-Lithuanian uprisings of 1830–1831 and 1863–1864, as well as Belarusian writers and intellectuals such as Vincent Dunin-Martsinkevich, Karus Kaganets, Ales Harun, and Yakub Kolas, and during the Soviet era it became infamous as a site of Stalinist repression, with executions in its basement in the 1930s and it being the only place in Belarus where death sentences were carried out after 1953, while in World War II it imprisoned captured partisans and underground fighters.