Liachavicy

Liachavicy is a town within the southwestern Belarusian Brest Region. Known since the XV century in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania because the center of the volost of the equal name. At the start of the sixteenth century, belonged to Albrecht Gashtol'd. After the demise of his son Stanislav in 1542 the town surpassed to the widow of the latter, Barbara Radziwill, who in 1547 married the heir to the Polish throne, bringing to him the numerous possessions of the Gashtol'ds.

On April 10, 1572, Sigismund II Augustus transferred the town to the castellan of Vilna, Jan Ieronimovich Khodkevich. His son, the hetman, the incredible Lithuanian Jan Karol Khodkevich, built there in place of a small wooden castle a new stone citadel of bastion type in line with the most modern-day European models of that point. The castle was time and again unsuccessfully besieged with the aid of Ukrainian Cossacks and insurgent peasants. In 1635, the citadel and the town exceeded into the ownership of Sapieh.