Szestno

Poland, Poland

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Szestno is a small village in northeastern Poland's Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, in Mrągowo County, nestled amid the scenic Mazury lake district near streams connecting local lakes, historically tied to the Teutonic Order's frontier territories once inhabited by Prussian Galindians.

In 1348, the Knights built a wooden watchtower here—dubbed Seehesten—for border control and colonization, which Lithuanians burned in 1350, prompting a brick fortress rebuild by the 1360s with a quadrangular layout, 7-meter walls, northern residential wing, gatehouse, and facilities like a stud farm, mill, and brewery.

Serving as a pfleger's seat from 1401, it faced repeated attacks, briefly fell to Poles in the Thirteen Years' War, passed to ducal starosts after 1525 secularization, then decayed post-1752 into farm-integrated ruins now overgrown on private land, alongside the village's 15th-century Holy Cross church.