Vysokoe. Sapieha Castle.

In the Brest region of the Kamenets district there is a small town of Vysokoe, which in the days of the Polish state until 1939 was called Vysoko – Litovsk. The first written memories of the high date back to the 14th century. In the 15th century, the place had the right of Magdeburg.

Prince Vytautas financed the first Catholic church here in the 15th century. Since the 16th century, the owners of the town have been Khreptovichi, and then Petkevichi, Yodkovichi and Khlevitsky. In 1603, the new owner of the town, Andrei Voina, founded the Church of the Holy Trinity. There were several bells in the church, where the largest bell was named after Peter and Paul.

In 1647, the magnate Pavel Jan Sapieha (1609-1665), the Hetman of the Great Lithuanian, acquired the Vysokoe.

Sapieha is building a bastion castle. Earthen fortifications with bastions were built on the banks of the Pulva River and it turned out that the castle was surrounded by water from all sides, like an impregnable fortress on the island. On the side where the entrance gate was, there was a wide pond, through which a drawbridge was made. The entrance gate was located in the Earthen Rampart itself, there were two-story stone gates and had three strong gates. There was an arsenal of weapons and a lifting mechanism of the bridge in the gate. There were two large bastions on the sides of the gate. There was also an underground passage that led to the bastions. There were six more bastions along the perimeter of the defensive rampart. In the middle of the castle there was a wooden palace with outbuildings.

The castle was severely damaged during the war of the mid-17th century between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Kingdom of Moscow and during the Northern War. At the beginning of the 18th century, Prince Michal Sapieha restored the castle, which burned down in 1748. The castle was restored again, which was visited in 1775 by the last king of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Stanislaw August Poniatowski. The castle with buildings still existed at the turn of the 18th - 19th centuries and then gradually fell into disrepair. In the 19th century, the artist and composer Napoleon Orda visited the place, who showed us a drawing depicting a castle and a gate.

The entrance stone tower, the brama, reached the time of the First World War in good condition. In 1977, the famous Belarusian archaeologist Mikhail Tkachev conducted archaeological excavations on the territory of the castle.

 Earthen ramparts and ruins of stone gates have remained to our time. There is a local sports stadium on the territory of the former castle among the earthen ramparts.