Swallow’s Nest Castle is an architectural folly, located on the Crimean shore in southern Ukraine, built between 1911-1912 ontop of 130 ft high Aurora Cliff. Designed by Russian architect Leonid Sherwood, the castle overlooks Ai-Todor cape of the Black Sea and is located near the remnants of the Roman castrum of Charax.
The first building on the Aurora Cliff was a wooden cottage romantically named the “Love Castle” and constructed for a Russian general circa 1895.
In 1911, Baron von Steinheil, a Baltic German noble who had made a fortune extracting oil in Baku, aquired the timber cottage and within a year had it replaced by the current building. Though Scottish baronial and Neo-Moorish styles had been introduced in Crimea in the 1820’s, Swallow’s Nest is closer in style to German architectural follies, such as Neuschwanstein, Babelsberg, and Stolzenfels, although its precarious setting on the cliffs by the sea may also suggest the Belém Tower.