Medininkai Castle was built in the late 13th or early 14th centuries. According to the space covered, it is the largest castle in the present territory of Lithuania. The castle was built in the transitional period from the Romanesque to the Gothic style, and it is one of the earliest enclosure castles in Lithuania. In the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL), the old Kaunas Castle (destroyed in 1362), Krėva Castle, and Lida Castle were of the same type as Medininkai Castle.
The latter two are now in the territory of present Belarus.
Medininkai Castle is situated 32 km from the centre of Vilnius. The castle was built on a plain, surrounded by a swamp from the North and from the West; in the middle of the swamp, ran a nameless brook. The plan of the castle has survived till the present day without essential changes. A square courtyard covers the space of 1,85 hectares; together with two wide fossae and two ramparts its space is 6,5 hectares. The upper part of the defensive wall did not survive; the wall was from 14 to 15 metres in height and had approximately 280 arrow loops.
The length of the wall totalled 563 metres. There were 4 entrance gates in the wall: the upper gates, installed in the northern and southern walls, were 5 metres above the ground; the lower gates were in the eastern and western walls. The castle had 4 towers. The most important of them was the five-storey keep (donjon), situated in the northern corner; originally it was 30 metres in height, however, only 23 metres of it survived in the course of time.
The ceilings of the first four storeys were wooden, meanwhile, the top floor had a brick-built ogival arches. The keep served for defence, but also was used as living space. The castle was for the first time mentioned as a military object in 1402, when the Grand Commander of the Teutonic Order, Wilhelm von Helfenstein, did not manage to capture Vilnius, but seized and burned down Medininkai Castle; apparently only the wooden buildings were destroyed by fire, as historical sources of the late 14th and early 15th centuries describe Medininkai Castle as stone construction.
