Kinzweiler Castle

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Kinzweiler Castle
Manor house of Kinzweiler Castle

Manor house of Kinzweiler Castle

Creation time : around 1500
Castle type : Niederungsburg
Conservation status: essential parts received
Construction: Quarry stone, brick
Place: Kinzweiler
Geographical location 50 ° 50 '45 "  N , 6 ° 13' 51"  E Coordinates: 50 ° 50 '45 "  N , 6 ° 13' 51"  E
Kinzweiler Castle (North Rhine-Westphalia)
Kinzweiler Castle

The castle Kinzweiler is a moated castle in Eschweiler district Kinzweiler on the eastern side of the Wardener road opposite the junction of Church Street.

The manor was one of the largest and most important in the Aachen / Düren region. Today only the manor house remains of him , which is privately owned and can therefore only be viewed from the outside.

history

As a builder of Kinzweiler castle , the family is from Palant which the rule Kinzweiler together two existing there moths 1420 by the heirs of the Knights acquired from Kinzweiler. Historians assume that the family gave up the outdated moths as a residence in the following years and instead used the Kinzweiler Castle, which was newly built by Dietrich von Palant at the beginning of the 16th century.

The plant remained in the family's possession until 1639 and then passed to Count Philipp Dietrich von Waldeck , a great-grandson of Floris von Palant, before Duke Ernst Friedrich I of Saxony-Hildburghausen acquired it in 1707. His descendants sold the castle in 1747 to the Elector and Duke of Jülich Karl Theodor von der Pfalz . Around the middle of the 18th century, the duke had the entire complex redesigned and expanded in the Baroque style, with parts of the old, Gothic structure being included in the renovation.

In 1782 the Counts of Hatzfeld acquired the property and subsequently leased it before they sold it to the von Arenberg ducal family in 1845 . Further changes of ownership followed: in 1928 the Eschweiler Mining Association acquired the castle and sold it in 1956 to the legal predecessor of today's Rheinbraun AG . In 1970, this had the two elongated, rectangular outer bailey torn down. There, stables, barns and tool sheds, the castle's forge, a had Stellmacherei to 1884 - -, a brewery and a oil mill found. When the castle was endangered by the nearby lignite mine, in 1981 five families jointly acquired the remaining manor house and had it converted for residential purposes.

Building description

Site plan of the castle

The mansion of the Kinzweiler Burg is a three-winged brick building with ivy and surrounded on three sides by a moat . Until the start of open-cast lignite mining, it was fed by the Merzbach flowing past to the west . Even if the southern wing of the house is much shorter than the northern one and so the castle appears at first glance like a two-wing complex, the building wings frame a typical baroque courtyard , which can be reached via a two-flight staircase. The oldest parts of the building are the cellar, which is partly made of quarry stone , only a small part of which is below ground level, as well as some Gothic cross-lattice windows on the courtyard side of the south wing. The rest of the arched windows in the building and the hipped roof date from the middle of the 18th century.

During the interior renovation with the accompanying gutting after 1981, a third floor was added to the formerly two-story building by inserting new false ceilings and the old structure was almost completely destroyed. Only two baroque stucco rooms and an oak-paneled empire room from the Napoleonic era have survived .

Oddities

One in 1900 from Düren recorded announcements collector Heinrich Hoffmann According to tradition, the servants, who in the barn were the farmhouse spent the night, by a werewolf-like plagued being that the description of a great resemblance to the aufhocker had known fiend of German mythology. The monster sat on the sleeping man's chest, who was paralyzed, could not scream and almost choked from shortness of breath and fear.

literature

  • Ulrich Coenen: Architectural treasures in the Aachen district. G. Mainz, Aachen 1987, ISBN 3-925714-11-1 , pp. 80-82.
  • Holger A. Dux , Dirk Holtermann: The Aachen Castle Round. Cycling between Wurm and Inde. Walter Rau, Düsseldorf 2000, ISBN 3-7919-0749-2 , p. 42.
  • Heinrich Hoffmann: Legends from the Indes area. Folklore of the Jülich Land Volume 2. Eschweiler 1914.
  • Herbert Limpens: City of Eschweiler (= Rheinische Kunststätten issue 271). 1st edition. Neusser Druckerei und Verl., Neuss 1983, ISBN 3-88094-439-3 , p. 17.