The construction of the Zolochiv Castle at the expense of Yakov Sobieski, the father of the king of the Commonwealth, Jan III Sobieski, was completed in 1634. It was built as a defensive fortress designed by an Italian architect whose name has not been preserved in history, on the site of an old wooden castle surrounded by moats. The Sobieski Palace was the first building on our lands to be equipped with sewerage and fireplace heating. Subsequently, another palace appeared nearby, which was called Chinese. Its king, Jan Casimir, who inherited the castle, built for his wife Maria Casimira de Lagrange and planted a wonderful oriental garden around.There are three museums on the territory. Entrance to each is paid separately - everywhere there is something to see - you will not regret it:
1. Large residential palace - filled with treasures of European art in many rooms of various themes. A considerable number of exhibits tells about the royal life in the Zolochiv Castle with interesting secrets of the personal nature of the owners.
2. The Pink Rotunda or the Chinese Palace is one of the few samples in Ukraine with a claim to oriental architecture. It houses the Museum of Oriental Cultures, which contains rare exhibits from China, Japan, India and other countries. Photography is not allowed in the Chinese Palace.
3. Dungeons - here they store the remains of stone fragments and columns from the Gothic Lviv before the fire of 1572. And lanterns are everywhere - look at how the ancestors illuminated the life.
Interesting Facts
1. In the dungeons of the Zolochiv Castle, they often see the mysterious White Lady, a ghost, which, according to legend, is the soul of the wife of King Jan Sobezky - Marysenka, that's how he affectionately called her. After the death of her husband, the queen, a Frenchwoman by birth, returned to her homeland, because the local nobility disliked her. And now, according to legend, her ghost returns to the castle to visit the abandoned house.
2. A special pride of the Zolochiv castle is its toilets. Indeed, at the time of the construction of the fortress, this was an extreme rarity. In addition, these toilets are made so skillfully that modern experts are still exploring the technology of their manufacture.
3. Zolochiv Castle interests visitors not only with unique exhibits inside the palace, but also with stones with encrypted inscriptions dated to the end of the 14th - beginning of the 15th century. They were brought in 2000 from the outskirts of Zolochev - the village of Novoselki. Some scholars believe that the inscriptions could have been left by the Templars, who probably owned the Novoselkovsky Castle, from which meager ruins remain today.