The photos shown below were taken by Jolanta Wilkonska, who sent them to this web site. Jolanta's great-grandfather was Prince Nikolai Ivanovitch Sviatopolk-Mirski. Her great uncle, Prince Mikhail N. Swiatopolk-Mirski, owned Mir castle until 1939. She has more information about the castle on a World Heritage web page, including the paragraph below:
"In 1895 Mir Castle became the property of my family, the Princes Swiatopolk-Mirski, and remained in our family’s ownership until the outbreak of WW II in 1939. I first became aware of the existence of the castle thanks to the photographs which hung on the wall of our house among the family photographs, but more especially so because my mother Princess Kira Ivanowna stayed with my great-uncle Prince Mikhail N. Swiatopolk-Mirski, who was the owner of the estate. My maternal grandfather also lived there."
Jolanta attended the festival for the restoration of Mir Castle. Her photos were first exhibited in Jelenia Gora, Poland and later presented at an exhibition in Mir Castle in 2005, at the invitation of the Belarus Embassy in Warsaw, in conjunction with the National Art Museum of Belarus.
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Translation: Ancestral castle in Mir of the Swiatopolk-Mirski Princes until 1939 - in the former Polish eastern borderlands, and now - a branch of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Minsk, Belarus and under patronage of UNESCO.
