Greiffenstein Castle
The ruins of Greiffenstein Castle ( Zamek Gryf in Polish ) are located on a 423 m high basalt peak. It is located one kilometer south of the village of Proszówka ( Graeflich Neundorf) in the municipality of Gryfów Śląski (Greiffenberg) in Poland .
history
The castle was probably built in the 12th century as the seat of a noble von Greiff, but this is not certain. Thanks to its location about three kilometers east of the Queis , straddling the border between the at this time Duchy of Silesia and to Bohemia belonging oberlausitz rule Queiskreis formed, they probably used the border security. At the beginning of the 13th century it was the seat of the bailiff of the precincts of Greiffenberg-Greiffenstein. A document has proven to be a forgery, according to which a castellan was supposed to have sat at the castle in 1242 .
The castle, which had belonged to the Duchy of Schweidnitz-Jauer since 1274/77, consisted only of the upper castle. In 1354 Seyfried von Raußendorf received it as a pledge. After the death of Duke Bolko II in 1368, Greiffenstein and the Duchy of Schweidnitz-Jauer inherited in 1368 to the Bohemian King Wenceslaus , who was a son of Queen Anna of Schweidnitz . However, Bolkos II. Widow, the Duchess Agnes von Habsburg , was entitled to a lifelong usufruct . After her death in 1392 the Greiffenstein of King Wenceslas was the governor Benesch of Chusnik (Beneš z Choustníka) initially pledged and sold two years later. Under the burgrave Wolf von Romke appointed by Chusnik, the castle was a robber baron's nest . In 1399 Romke was captured by the Greiffenbergers and beheaded in the castle.
In 1400 Benesch von Chusnik pledged the Greiffenstein to Gotsche II. Schof , who already owned the Kynast Castle . When Gotsche Schof acquired the rule of Greiffenstein with the towns of Greiffenberg and Friedeberg one year before his death in 1419 , he laid an essential foundation stone for the possessions of his descendants in the Jizera and Giant Mountains . Between 1425 and 1426 Gotsche III delivered himself. several feuds with the city of Görlitz from Greiffenstein .
After the reunions of Greiffenstein and Kynast by Gotsches III. In 1511, nephew Ulrich I von Schaffgotsch began a considerable expansion of the castle, which was continued by Johann (Hans) von Schaffgotsch after Ulrich's death in 1543. Before the old upper castle that dominated the system, a central castle, below still arose bailey was set before. All three parts of the castle were separately surrounded by castle walls and formed a huge castle complex. Hans, who died in 1584, had married Magdalena von Zedlitz in 1551 , who brought the Giersdorf rulership into the marriage as a dowry.
Hans Ulrich von Schaffgotsch , who was born in the castle in 1595, expanded the Schaffgott property to include the lords of Trachenberg , Alt Kemnitz , Hertwigswalde , Prausnitz and Schmiedeberg . In 1627 he was raised to the freedom of Semper . After his execution in Regensburg in 1635 (as an alleged co-conspirator of Wallenstein ), his heirs later received the confiscated property back, with the exception of the Trachenberg class rule . During the Thirty Years' War the Swedes stormed the Greiffenstein in 1645, which they had besieged five years earlier in vain .
After the end of the war it was no longer the well-fortified castles, but representative palace buildings that the nobility preferred as their place of residence. The ancestral seat of the Schaffgotsch was now the Kynast Castle, and the damage to the Greiffenstein was no longer repaired. When Kynast Castle burned down in 1675, the Warmbrunn estate , where a castle had stood since the end of the 16th century, became the family seat.
Johann Nepomuk von Schaffgotsch, who had already started the new construction of the Warmbrunn Castle, which burned down in 1777, had a simple summer castle built below the Greiffenstein in 1798, which served as the administrative seat and was completed in 1800. At the same time he had most of the castle razed and partly used as building material. Despite the demolition of most of the castle, the existing ruins are still impressive and large.
Several legends are spun around the ruins, including that of the Vogel Greiff , a haunted ancestral wife or the knight Gotsche . Theodor Körner also visited the castle and dedicated the poem Auf dem Greiffenstein to it.
The Greiffenstein remained in the possession of the Schaffgotsch family until it was expropriated in 1945.
In Frankfurt there is a Catholic student union named after Greiffenstein Castle , the KDSt.V. Greiffenstein (Breslau) to Frankfurt am Main.
literature
- Karl August Müller: Patriotic images, in a history and description of the old castle festivals and knight castles of Prussia. Glogau 1837, pp. 377-295.
- Hugo Weczerka (Hrsg.): Handbook of the historical places . Volume: Silesia (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 316). Kröner, Stuttgart 1977, ISBN 3-520-31601-3 , p. 107 and 424, p. 149f.
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 59 ′ 33.4 " N , 15 ° 25 ′ 16.9" E