Sorkwity Palace

From a distance Sorkwity Palace looks like a Teutonic Knights' fortress: red brick, battlements, turrets and a tall octagonal tower above the water. In fact it is a mid-19th-century residence, built for the Prussian von Mirbach family in the then-fashionable English Gothic Revival style. It stands on a narrow strip of land between Lake Gielądzkie and Lake Lampackie, about 12 km west of Mrągowo in Masuria.

Watchtower, manor and palace

The site was defensive from the start. In 1379 Grand Master Winrich von Kniprode of the Teutonic Order granted the land to the von Oelsen brothers, and later a wooden watchtower was built at Sorkwity to protect the village from Lithuanian raids. In the 15th century the estate passed to the von Schlieben family, and from 1750 to 1804 it belonged to the Polish Bronikowski family – hussar major Jan Oppeln-Bronikowski built the first manor house here in 1788.

In 1804 the estate was bought by the von Mirbach family. In 1850–1856, on the orders of Julius Ulrich von Mirbach, a two-storey red-brick palace resembling a castle replaced the manor. At the same time a carriage house shaped like a fortified tower was built and a landscape park laid out, while on a peninsula of Lake Lampackie came paths, a vineyard for the family's own wine and the Mirbach family cemetery.

Fire before Tannenberg

In August 1914 Russian troops under General Alexander Samsonov were quartered in the palace. On the night of 26–27 August 1914, just before the Russian defeat at Tannenberg, the residence was burned – only the load-bearing walls survived, while the interiors and art collections were lost. The childless count left the estate to his wife's nephew, Baron Bernhard von Paleske, an aide-de-camp to Emperor Wilhelm II. After the count's death in 1921, Paleske rebuilt the palace in 1922–1923 under the Berlin architect Otto Rüger, faithfully following the original design.

The Second World War spared the building, but its contents were looted. After 1945 a state farm took it over (a kindergarten, storerooms, flats), and from 1957 the palace served as a holiday centre for the Ursus works in Warsaw. Since 1998 the complex has been privately owned.

What to look for

• The octagonal tower in the north-east corner – the dominant feature of the building.
• Pointed-arch windows of different sizes, pinnacles and battlements, all meant to make the house look like a medieval castle.
• The carriage house on the north-west side, which looks like a bastion with four corner turrets.
• The park with its old trees, including a ginkgo next to the palace.

Tripto tip

A hotel was fitted into the restored interiors and a restaurant into the carriage house, but some travel sites list the property as closed and the palace's old website no longer works – check before you go whether it is taking guests, and think of the palace mainly as a monument to view from outside. Sorkwity has a railway stop on the Olsztyn–Ełk line and lies on the S16 expressway. A few hundred metres away, on Lake Gielądzkie, stands the Lutheran church with an early 18th-century tower and a late Renaissance altar of 1642, and on Lake Lampackie there is a canoe base on the Krutynia river trail.