Brukenthal's summer residence

Brukenthal's summer residence
	Main building of the castle from the park side
Creation time :	1757-1770
Conservation status:	In need of renovation
Place:	Avrig
Geographical location	45 ° 43 '46 " N , 24 ° 22' 37" E Coordinates: 45 ° 43 '46 " N , 24 ° 22' 37" E

The orangery

View of the French garden

Tulip tree in the Dutch garden

Summer residence in winter, 2007

Chapel of the sanatorium

The Brukenthal summer residence ( Romanian Palatul de vară Brukenthal ) is a late baroque palace complex in Transylvania in what is now Romania . It was built between 1757 and 1770 on behalf of Samuel von Brukenthal , who later became governor of Transylvania , in Freck ( Rum .: Avrig ) and is architecturally based on baroque Austrian models. The castle with its gardens is the only surviving baroque complex of its kind in all of Romania, but is today in a bad state of need of renovation.

history

Emergence

Samuel von Brukenthal came from a Transylvanian-Saxon civil servant family from Leschkirch ; his father was raised to the nobility in 1724. In the reign of Maria Theresa (1740–1780) he made a career in the Austrian civil service and became wealthy; Maria Theresa's husband, Emperor Franz I , made him imperial baron in 1762. He decided to build a summer residence outside of Sibiu , with associated baroque gardens in keeping with the taste of the time .

Since he already owned land on the Alt -Ebene, the choice of the location fell on Freck, a then small Saxon town directly on the Alt-River. In 1757 he bought 1.5 farmsteads there and adjacent gardens. In 1760, construction began on a single-storey house with farm buildings.

In 1761 Brukenthal concluded a lease agreement with the then governor of Transylvania, Nikolaus Adolph Freiherr von Buccow , which transferred the use of the facility and its further expansion to Buccow. (Brukenthal's place of employment at that time was Vienna.) He now began to convert the house into a baroque castle with flanking farm buildings. He acquired other adjacent properties and had them terraced in order to create an Italian and a French ornamental garden and a pheasant garden . In 1764 Baron von Buccow died without leaving a will . This was followed by a legal dispute over several years over the inheritance. The palace and gardens were not yet completed at this point.

In 1768 Samuel von Brukenthal, meanwhile director of the Transylvanian Court Chancellery in Vienna, was able to acquire the property completely for himself, and the construction work that had meanwhile been suspended was resumed. Architectural models were the baroque palaces with their gardens that Brukenthal had got to know in Vienna: Maria Theresa's Schönbrunn Palace , the Belvedere Palace left by Prince Eugene of Savoy , and especially Laxenburg Palace south of Vienna. Greenhouses were added to the orangery , which has existed since 1765 . In 1770 work on the castle was completed. In the same year, a Dutch garden with exotic plants was laid out in addition to the Italian and French gardens, and in 1775 the complex was expanded to include an English landscape garden including an artificial pond. In addition, staffages were erected in the gardens such as small waterfalls and an artificial ruin, as well as a hermitage and a gloriette . Brukenthal had a gardener come from Vienna for this purpose.

The complex became a center of attraction for scholars from Transylvania who were interested in natural science, such as the Austrian botanist Joseph Raditschnigg von Lerchenfeld, the Kronstadt native Peter Sigerus and the Lausitz native Johann Christian Gottlob Baumgarten . Numerous exotic trees were planted in the Dutch garden that Brukenthal wanted to acclimate in Transylvania, such as almond trees , nutmeg trees , Japanese ornamental shrubs, North American maples and tulip trees . In the greenhouses, attempts were made to grow pineapples , coffee , sugar cane and date palms . A thousand lime and orange trees were planted in the orangery . The strictly separated French garden in the west of the complex, on the other hand, was characterized by strict symmetry, with straight avenues, bosquets , flower beds , fountains and the representative staircase to the main building.

In addition, however, there were also two kitchen gardens, the so-called “Nebenkuchel gardens”, in which fruit and vegetables were grown for personal use. It was there that the first attempts at cultivating potatoes were made in order to find a high-yielding fruit against the recurring famine in Transylvania. In addition to the stately buildings, there were two agricultural farms on the site, from whose income the facility was to be maintained. There horses were bred for export to Austria and legendary breeding attempts were made with white buffalo .

In the castle itself, living rooms and guest rooms were set up as well as a gallery for the baron's extensive collection of paintings. This comprised 212 pictures and 129 copperplate engravings. Overall, the entire complex was a reflection of Brukenthal's extensive passion for collecting. His secretary Johann Theodor Hermann described the complex as a Transylvanian Eden , as the best and most perfect of flowers, fruits and cakes in Europe are gathered there.

Owned by the Saxon University of Nations

Samuel von Brukenthal died childless in 1803. In his will he had determined that the castle and gardens should be preserved and that the cultural heritage should be preserved. In 1817, however, his relatives' line of inheritance also expired, and so the complex came into the possession of the Saxon University of Nations . After the Austro-Hungarian reconciliation of 1867, the University of Nations was dissolved as a political organization, but the property ownership could be continued in a foundation.

In 1908, the presbytery of the Sibiu Protestant parish under the then regional church curator Carl Wolff bought the property. The administration was taken over by the Brukenthal Foundation together with the Hygienic Association of the Sibiu County . In keeping with the trend of the way of thinking at the time, they wanted to put the castle into practical use and therefore set up a rest home in it, which was later converted into a water spa based on the model of Pastor Kneipp .

After the First World War , Transylvania came to the Kingdom of Romania , and in a land reform in 1921 all of the foundation's undeveloped land was expropriated. In 1937 the foundation was completely dissolved. The Saxon regional church then took over possession of the castle .

In the People's Republic

When the communists took over power in Romania after the Second World War , the Evangelical Church was almost completely expropriated. Only the church buildings and the rectory remained in their possession. The Brukenthal summer residence came into the possession of the socialist Romanian state. He built a lung sanatorium for tuberculosis sufferers in the historic buildings . Walls were drawn in in the main building to create additional hospital rooms. A small Orthodox chapel was set up for the patients in the orangery.

The sanatorium was later closed. Only the dispensary set up in the orangery remained in the palace complex , the typical medical station with a doctor's practice that existed in every larger town under socialism. The main building of the castle was no longer used and therefore fell into disrepair. The gardens were also no longer cared for, instead the employees of the medical station used the areas to make hay and kept chickens.

A cultural or tourist use of the facility was out of the question for ideological reasons. In the first phase of communist rule, it was seen as the work of a " feudal exploiter ". Later, when the regime under Nicolae Ceaușescu increasingly took on nationalist traits, the castle was considered an undesirable architectural monument of the Transylvanian Saxons.

Meaning today

During the Baroque style in that time under Ottoman suzerainty standing Romanian Altreich never been fashionable, there was the Austrian Transylvania well some comparable systems. Samuel von Brukenthal also had an elaborate baroque garden laid out in Sibiu, outside the city walls in front of the Heltauer Tor, at the end of today's Nicolae-Bălcescu-Boulevard. At this point, however, the large 90s barracks were built during the Habsburg era, which was later completely demolished under Ceaușescu. Nothing has been preserved from this system. There were also the baroque gardens of Count Haller von Hallerstein in Weißkirch near Schäßburg (Rum .: Albeşti ) and in Klausenburg , which also no longer exist today. There were also two baroque castles of Hungarian noblemen in Transylvania, the ancestral seat of the Bolyai family owned by the Bethlens in the village of Bell and the Apafi family estate in Malmkrog , which later also belonged to the Bethlens. The former is now just a ruin, of which little has been preserved. The latter was also totally ruined during the communist era and was completely reconstructed at the end of the 1990s. Only a few rooms of the Apafi Castle in Malmkrog consist of the old building fabric. This makes the Brukenthal summer residence the only Baroque complex of its kind that has been preserved in its entirety in today's Romania.

After the end of communism, the summer palace in Freck was restituted by the Romanian state to the German minority in Transylvania after a lengthy legal battle in 1999, but it was in a very poor condition. The gardens were completely overgrown, although there were still some exotic trees from Brukenthal's time. In the former French, Italian and English gardens, the old symmetries were roughly recognizable, while hardly anything remains of the Dutch garden. Just a few preserved tulip trees reveal where the Dutch garden must have once been. The castle itself and the flanking farm buildings are very dilapidated. None of the interiors are still in their original condition, instead remains of the former hospital rooms from the time when the castle was used as a tuberculosis sanatorium can be seen. The former furniture from Brukenthal's time is now in the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu .

Since the restitution, the management and maintenance of the facility has been taken over by the Brukenthal Foundation, newly established in 1997, which has carried out the first renovation work since then. The overgrown garden in particular was provisionally reconstructed in 2005 and 2006 with the support of the German Federal Environment Foundation . In addition, the orangery buildings were renovated and can now be used for concerts and events. A summer ball of the German Forum takes place there once a year . Simple guest rooms have also been set up in the orangery, giving tourists the opportunity to spend the night in the castle grounds.

In the main building of the castle, however, only the roof has been renovated to date due to a lack of financial resources. However, it is still popular with Romanian wedding parties, as it is still a nice photo opportunity, at least from the outside. In 2006 a Berlin gardening and landscape architecture company created a park renovation concept in cooperation with the Samuel von Brukenthal Foundation, which is funded by the German Federal Foundation for the Environment and the Center for International Migration and Development .

The facility is open to visitors every day in summer, but tours are usually only in Romanian, as the last Saxon castle keeper retired in 2009.