In fortifications such as strongholds or castles one of the most important elements was the gateway. As a part of a stronghold’s rampart or a castle’s ring walls it was at the same time the weakest point of the fortifications. For that reason gateways were equipped with the greatest number of defensive elements such as gatehouses with rooms for the guard, gateways with portcullises, moats with drawbridges and flanking towers. The flanking tower seems to be the most important of them. Protruding out from the defensive walls and at a distance from the gateway, over a dozen metres high, with thick stone walls, narrow windows used as loopholes and connected to the gallery running round the defensive walls it was therefore very well prepared to defend both the gateway and the foreground.
      Cieszyn castle which was built on the site of an earlier Slavic stronghold consisted of two parts; the upper castle, where the stronghold was originally located; and the lower castle. The upper castle was separated from the lower one by an inner southern wall, no longer in existence, consisting of a gateway and a flanking tower. It should be mentioned here that the stronghold had a similar defensive structure whose southern rampart with most probably a wooden gate would have been responsible for the defence of the gateway and the south-eastern foreground which here was much more accessible than the steep slopes of the other sides.
      Archaeological excavations carried out on the Cieszyn Castle Hill in the 1940s and 1950s partially uncovered the remains of the upper castle’s gateway. But since the researchers concentrated mostly on the early medieval stronghold, the medieval structures did not attract much interest to the extent that no important information concerning the latter ones was mentioned in the documentation. Today some elements of the construction of the gatehouse, the cobbled approach and remains of the flanking tower are exposed but they do not give visitors a true impression of their original appearance. For example, the remains of the stone flanking tower are often taken for a well. The next series of archaeological excavations was initiated by the town authorities in the 1990s in order to successively uncover all the remains of the Piast castle still lying underground. In 2002 the site of the upper castle’s gateway was partially examined. During those excavations apart from the stone foundations of the gatehouse and another section of the cobbled road leading from the lower castle’s gate to the upper castle’s courtyard, a section of the defensive wall connecting the gateway with the flanking tower was also uncovered. The discovery of the flanking tower’s remains seems to be most interesting. The circular tower, with a diameter of almost 10 metres, of which only the foundations have survived was built of limestone. The walls were 3.3 m thick and the diameter of the interior was over 3 m. The southern part of the tower protruded almost 4 m beyond the walls which meant that enemies attacking the gate were an easy target for bows and crossbows being fired from the tower. The entrances to the tower were from the courtyard, at ground level and higher, accessible from the gallery running round the defensive walls. The cylindrical interior was probably divided into storeys by wooden platforms connected by wooden stairs or ladders. The upper storeys were equipped with loopholes. The accompanying illustration is an attempt to reconstruct the appearance of the tower, and it is based on the remains of the foundations and the engraving of the castle by M. Merian dating from before 1647. Since the archaeological excavations are still in their early stages, it is hard to specify the age of the tower conclusively. Its large diameter, only 2 m narrower than that of the keep situated on the northern side of the courtyard, and stonework of the foundations suggest that the tower could have been built at the end of the 13th century before the modification of the southern wing of the castle. A similar arrangement, consisting of two towers located opposite each other existed, for example, in Legnica. We hope that further excavations will solve a lot of unanswered questions, and finally a partial reconstruction in situ of elements of the gateway will be possible, as was the case with the keep in the northern part of the upper castle.