Świny Castle
| Świny Castle | ||
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 Świny Castle (2004) |
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| Alternative name (s): | Zamek Świny (pl.) | |
| Creation time : | around 1100 | |
| Castle type : | Hilltop castle | |
| Conservation status: | Ruin. partially reconstructed | |
| Standing position : | Knight's castle | |
| Place: | Bolków | |
| Geographical location | 50 ° 56 '19.4 " N , 16 ° 6' 44" E | |
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The castle Świny (German Schweinhausburg ) is the ruin of a hilltop castle close to the northern city limits of the town of Bolków ( Bolkenhain ) above the village Świny ( Schweinhaus ), Powiat Jaworski (Jauer district) in the Polish Voivodeship of Lower Silesia and is the oldest castle in Lower Silesia and the oldest non-ducal castle in what is now Poland .
history
The family tradition of the Lords of Schweinichen ( de Swyne , von Schwein , Sweinchen , Schweinoch ) tells the legend of a Bohemian knight Biwoy , who killed a dangerous boar with his own hands (in another version: caught alive) and at the feet of the legendary Bohemian Queen Libussa threw, for which he received the hand of her sister Kasia and the land around today's Schweinhausburg. This is said to have happened around 760. How far this legend is founded cannot be determined today, but it is certain that the Schweinichen, who held the castle from the 12th century until 1713, are Slavic knights who lived in Silesia before the conquest of the country by the Polish Duke Mieszko I was a resident and was a loyal follower of the Piasts .
The oldest news about the castle comes from 1108: the Bohemian chronicler Kosmas of Prague mentioned that the voivode Mutina from the powerful Bohemian family of the Vrchovets had ridden to Castrum Suini in Poloniae to meet his uncle Nemoy and to oppose the Duke Svatopluk from Olomouc to organize. In 1155 Suini is mentioned again as Zpini , in a document from Pope Hadrian IV. In the 13th century the castle seems to have been a ducal castellany , because according to the Tader de Swyna (1230), Comes Jaxa castellanus de Svyne , and after him (1248) Petrico castellanus de Zuni . The church at Swina appeared in the Regesten as early as 1313 and can therefore be regarded as Silesia’s oldest surviving village church. The richest and most powerful Schweinichen was Hainricus (around 1323), who was the first Silesian knight to take part in the Crusades and who owned 24 villages around the castle. In 1371 the goods were divided between his two grandchildren, Heinrich Berchen (Eberchen) and Günzel , Günzel received the castle and had it expanded. From a message from 1351 we learn that the Swyn estate was formerly in the hands of the Schweinichen family than all of Silesia was in the hands of the Piasts. It is therefore very likely that the Piasts, after taking Silesia, elevated the already existing (probably wooden) fortress to a castellany, which was supposed to defend the important trade route from Wroclaw via Jauer and Landeshut to Trautenau in Bohemia and on to Prague . Soon, however, it seemed advisable to the Piasts to build a new fortress opposite the Schweinhausburg, in the Flecken Hain , which took on the function of castellany and was called Bolkoburg from around 1820 . The Schweinhausburg is one of the few Silesian castles that was spared from all military campaigns, both from the Hussite in the 15th century, which devastated the country, as the Swedish in the Thirty Years War , it even became one of the greatest Silesian castles in the middle of this war expanded with 300 rooms, so that it was the largest castle in the country in the 17th century. The ruin brought her the pillage by the Russians in the Seven Years War and the indifference of the new owners in the 19th century.
The castle remained in the hands of Günzel's descendants until 1713. The last lord of the castle from this family was the Brandenburg Colonel Georg Ernst von Schweinichen (1670–1702), who died very young and left six underage children behind. The children's guardians sold the castle and the four associated goods to Sebastian Heinrich von Schweinitz , Georg Ernst's son-in-law. The castle remained with the Schweinitzen until 1769 and was then sold by foreclosure auction to the Prussian minister Johann Heinrich Graf von Churschwandt , who was soon taken over by his young eighteen-year-old wife Maria Theresia née. Countess von Nimptsch was inherited. The castle stayed with her descendants from their second marriage, the Austrian Count Hoyos von Sprinzenstein, until 1941 when it was sold to the state. In 1991 it became private property again.
The Hoyos resided in Vienna and had their Silesian property managed by tenants who left the castle to complete disrepair. The Leipzig writer Carl Herloßsohn , who visited the castle in 1840, left the following description:
“On the mountain itself is the chapel and the old castle, one of the largest in Silesia. From a distance one notices the many walls, gables and remains of towers, but the closer one gets, the more the number of buildings develops, some of which have been erected in recent times and for the most part only in walls, more rarely with half-roofing and in them There stand staring rafters in the air. It is all the more sad that this mighty castle, which could easily be made habitable again by roofing, has to be gradually destroyed, as the walls are being destroyed in a rocky area and used as building blocks. "
The slow reconstruction of the Schweinhausburg did not begin until 1905, when Count Stanislaus Hoyos left the maintenance to the Bolkenhain home association. Numerous restorations and wall reinforcements, which have been carried out to this day (2005), succeeded in slowing the decay of the mighty building.
architecture
Castle
The Schweinhausburg (popularly until 1945: Soihoisel ), total area of the property around 18,000 m², is located on the extreme end of an elongated hill, from which it was previously separated by a wall that moved far to the east. The oldest part of the castle, the rectangular residential tower (clearly visible in the photo, called Radish until 1945 ), which was probably built by Hainricus de Swyn around 1300 instead of a wooden house , is located at the highest point of the area, which has been painstakingly leveled by lining walls : above Its vaulted ground floor has four floors with a length of 18.30 m and width of 12.60 m, with walls that are 2.5 m thick. Remains of round-arched Romanesque windows can still be seen on the west facade of the residential tower, which were bricked up during the major renovations after 1655. Today's roof has the shape of a gable roof and consists of shingles . The facade was adorned with geometric sgraffito ornaments in the 17th century , the remains of which are visible on the outer wall of the stair tower, which was built in the last phase of the renovation, after 1660 (the "hollow tooth" in the photo). The sgraffito ornaments seem to have been very fashionable in Silesia at the time, as can only be seen today in Oels Castle (see photo in the Oels article). On the first floor there was the ballroom with a wooden ceiling and walls that were decorated with rich stucco ornaments, the well-preserved remains of which are visible in the window niches. The higher floors were divided into smaller rooms - we can still see traces of the partition walls and parts of the stucco ornamentation. On the west side there is a walled up Gothic pointed arch portal. The old entrance was to the north of the tower, where there is still a passage into the upper courtyard of the so-called middle castle, which was built in the 15th century and has a slightly lower position.
Only the outer walls with small window openings and remnants of the former main gate remain of the gothic central castle from the time of Günzel von Schweinichen, which is located west of the stair tower. The bay window above this gate was created during the renovation in the 17th century.
The newest part of the castle is the gate building, built by Johann Sigismund von Schweinichen (see: Castle Church ) from the years 1649 to 1664, also called the Palais or Lower Castle. It is a square palace, the front facade of which is flanked by two round towers. It used to have four gables, two of which survived. The composition of the gate portal, which comes from the last phase of the renovation (around 1661–1664), is reminiscent of triumphal arches . The pedestrian entrance next to it also has the shape of an arch. Heavily boned ornaments surround the two door openings. Above the tympanum is the armorial cartouche of those von Schweinichen, whose helmet covers merge into cornucopia on both sides . All facades of the castle were covered in the 17th century with sgraffito decorations in the form of geometric fields into which the windows were built. They are still clearly visible on the south facade. The sandstone window frames are well preserved.
Castle Church of St. Nicholas
Today's parish church in the village of Świny dates back to the early 14th century, was originally Romanesque and was built in the second half of the 16th century, during the reign of Johann von Schweinichen and his wife Barbara, née. von Rothkirch , who was an ardent supporter of Luther, was rebuilt and modernized in the Renaissance style. At that time it was furnished according to the Protestant model, which remained unchanged from 1653, when the church was re-Catholicized, until today (2005). The benches are grouped around the pulpit according to the Protestant model , are covered with inlays - imitations with plant motifs and Bible verses selected by Barbara (of course German ). The church has interesting tombs of the old lords of the castle: Günzels from 1503 ( Gothic ), his son Burgmann , who died in 1566 at the age of 110 because he caught a cold while hunting, and several other Schweinichen. The black marble plaque from 1624, which Johann Sigismund had put on as a memento of Jakob Boehme's last visit , unfortunately disappeared after 1945. On the southern outer wall of the church tower is the epitaph Johann , which was heavily damaged by stone damage ( 2006 : completely destroyed and illegible) Sigismunds, the son of the above Johann in his second marriage, which he entered into with a fifteen-year-old girl at the age of 80:
- " Here rests the mortal body of the well-born and stern, Mr. Johann Siegesmund von Schweinichen, Mr. von Schweinhauß, Wolmsdorf, Hondorf and Waltersdorf, who in his youth traveled through Germany, France, Italy, Engelland, the Netherlands with foreign languages, aristocratic arts and knightly exercises to such an extent incumbent on him to have become perfect above much of his own. At some age he left all worldly society and spent the greatest part of his life in solitary contemplations of the mysteries of God and nature, and in the process renovated this lair of Schweinhauß preciously and built it much larger. In old age he stayed with this lonely isolation until he closed the XXV of the month of May in Anno Domini MDCLXIV and in the 75 years of his life in Schweinhauß his pious life ”.
Personalities associated with the castle
- Jakob Böhme , spent the last weeks of his life here;
- Abraham von Franckenberg , a mystic, was a frequent guest here;
- Johann Ernst Graf Hoyos von Sprinzenstein , Austrian field marshal lieutenant , owned the castle around 1840;
- Rudolf Graf Hoyos von Sprinzenstein , poet and major collector, owned the castle around 1870;
- Johann Sigismund von Schweinichen, b. 1591, had the castle expanded and made it the spiritual center of the Silesian mysticism of the time;
- Angelus Silesius , took part in the discussions of the circle of mystics and inherited the whole pig house library.
literature
- Karl August Müller: Patriotic images, in a history and description of the old castle festivals and knight castles of Prussia. Glogau 1837, pp. 515-527.
- Alexander von Freyer: Schweinhaus Castle and its residents . Lund 1993
- Alexander von Freyer: A guide to Świny and Bolkow . (Translated from the German Original by Joachim von Schweinichen, Preface by Maurizio del Lago), Varese 2001
- Alexander von Freyer: Jauer and the Jauerland / Jawor i Ziemia Jaworska . Yes 1995
- Bolkenhainer Heimatblätter . Bolkenhain 1913-1943
- Carl Herloßsohn : Hikes through the Giant Mountains and the County of Glatz . Leipzig 1845
- Robert Mielke : The Schweinhausburg near Bolkenhain . In: Bodo Ebhardt (Ed.): Der Burgwart. Journal of Castle Studies . Berlin 1908
- Will-Erich Peuckert : Silesia . Hamburg 1950
- Constantin von Schweinichen: On the history of the lineage of those von Schweinichen . Wroclaw 1904.
- Rudolf Maria Bernhard von Stillfried-Alcantara: The Schweinhaus Castle and its owners. A historical account . Landolt, Hirschberg 1833 ( digitized version )
Web links
- Zamek Świny - Schweinhausburg na portalu polska-org.pl (Polish)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Joachim Lukas: Regional history notes from Silesia - Schweinhaus Castle (accessed on November 16, 2016)