Travel Guide Chęciny

This residential town has been dominated by the ruins of its medieval castle for many centuries. While it was a rather prosperous medieval city in the 13th century, it suffered a series of disasters in its wake: repeated looting, fire and then a plague epidemic, which reduced it to a handful of families in the mid-16th century. In parallel, its great fortress; a prison after having been a royal residence also fell into ruin as early as 1600! To save it, Jews settle there en masse, until they represent 60% of the population before the holocaust... it seems decidedly that the disasters accumulate.