Wineck Castle (Katzenthal)

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The Wineck castle ruins from the north-west

The Wineck Castle , also Weineck or (incorrectly) Windeck ( French Château de Wineck or Château du Wineck ), is the ruin of a late Romanesque hilltop castle in the Alsatian department of Haut-Rhin . Standing on a rock plateau, it towers over the small town of Katzenthal five kilometers northwest of Colmar at 330 meters above sea ​​level . It is the only Alsatian castle that stands in the middle of vineyards, which is where its name comes from: Wineck means "Weineck". The surrounding granite location Wineck-Schlossberg produces a Riesling and is one of the top Alsace wines ( Alsace Grand Cru ).

Emerging from a simple residential tower in the 13th century, the complex had been a fiefdom of the diocese of Basel since the second half of the 13th century and, during its 800-year history, was owned by the Counts of Pfirt , the Habsburgs and the Barons of Rathsamhausen . Since 1972, a club around the castle, which takes care of the keep is visible from afar.

After the ruins of the core castle had been classified as a monument historique in October 1984 , the outer curtain wall was added to the list of monuments in May 1991 .

description

Layout of the facility

The small castle complex lies on a hill-like rock spur and consists of a core castle , which was preceded by a slightly lower outer castle in the south . This was protected by an outer curtain wall , of which only a 15 meter long section in the southwest is authentic. The almost complete wall that can be seen today was only rebuilt during restorations since the 1970s.

The main castle consists of the almost 21 meter high ruin of an almost square keep and a roughly horseshoe-shaped inner ring wall that encompasses an area about 25 × 25 meters. This is surrounded on all sides by deep trenches . The neck trench on the north side is 18 meters wide after excavation work in the last quarter of the 20th century, while the eastern part of the trench was once at least ten meters wide.

The three storeys of the keep rise on a 6.94 × 7.39 meter floor plan and have walls more than two meters thick. They consist of hewn granite stone and greywacke , which on the lower floors are clad on the outside with light limestone, which is atypical for Alsace castles. The corner stones are humpback blocks made of red sandstone on the third floor . On the north side facing the mountain, the keep is protected on the second floor by humpback blocks. On its south side, it has a gate with a slight pointed arch on the second floor, to which a covered wooden balcony is built in front. For a long time it served as a high entrance until a new entrance was broken into the west wall of the first floor in the 19th century. The opening of a latrine is visible on the north side of the third floor.

To the west of the keep are - directly adjacent to the tower - the remains of a former residential building made of granite stones, while horse stables once stood on the eastern side. In the inner courtyard enclosed by the inner ring wall, there used to be a kitchen garden.

The ring wall of the main castle, the battlements of which are partly still visible, is mostly a 20th century reconstruction . It consists of granite rubble and is 1.5 meters thick and up to eight meters high. Its north side has a wall thickness of two meters. In its eastern part is the entrance gate of the small complex.

history

Beginnings

The ruins of the castle on a lithograph from 1839
The castle ruins around 1900

The roots of Burg Wineck go back to a residential tower that was built around 1200 on the grounds of the Counts of Egisheim . Its clients are not exactly known, but it is possible that it was built by the von Egisheim- Dagsburg family to secure their territory against the Hohenstaufen . When they died out with Gertrud von Baden in 1225 , both the Counts of Pfirt and the diocese of Strasbourg claimed ownership of them. The first documentary mention of the castle on February 5, 1251 comes from the settlement of this inheritance dispute, when Ulrich II von Pfirt Wineck - like the neighboring castle Hohnack - from Strasbourg Bishop Heinrich III. from Stahleck to fief. But only 20 years later, the priests gave all their castles to the bishop of Basel as a fief.

Excavations showed that the castle had undergone structural changes before it was first mentioned in a document around 1230. The tower of the tower castle surrounded by a palisade was raised to a height of about 18 meters. The curtain wall and a residential building on the west side of the tower were probably built at the same time.

Middle Ages and Modern Times

Through the marriage of Johannas , the heirloom of Ulrich III. von Pfirt, with Duke Albrecht II of Austria , the county of Pfirt and Wineck Castle came to the Habsburgs in 1324, who were subsequently enfeoffed with the castle by the Bishop of Basel. They gave the castle as an after-fief to the knights of Wineck, a patrician family from Colmar, who probably descended from the Girsbergers . They held this until it died out around 1340, before it was inherited by Hartmann von Rathsamhausen, the nephew of the last owner, Andreas von Wineck.

Under the Wineckers, the residential tower was raised by another upper floor with a vaulted ceiling in the 14th century . The builders had the old entrance on the first floor on the east wall one floor higher and on the south side of the keep. Only in a third and final phase of construction was the third floor of the tower added, with the stitch cap ceiling of the second being destroyed again. After a fire in the middle of the 15th century, the castle complex was abandoned and no longer used. It fell into disrepair in the following years and was mentioned in a loan deed from 1499 as "broken burkh".

The barons of Rathsamhausen remained the owners of the castle complex until they died out in 1828. Then it came to the Baron von Gail and was owned by the Bickard family from 1848 to 1864. This sold the ruins in 1866 for the symbolic price of one franc to the Society for the Conservation of Historical Monuments in Alsace ( Société pour la Conservation des Monuments historiques en Alsace ).

The castle today

Since 1972 the association “Société pour la Restauration et la Conservation du Château de Katzenthal” has been responsible for securing and partially restoring the castle complex , which can be visited on Sundays and public holidays in the afternoons from April to October. In the keep are exhibits that were found during excavations in the castle area, including a Romanesque double window, the location of which was the former cistern .

literature

  • Thomas Biller, Bernhard Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250) (= The castles of Alsace. Architecture and history. Vol. 2). Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-422-06635-9 , pp. 436–445.
  • Nicolas Mengus, Jean-Michel Rudrauf: Châteaux forts et fortifications médiévales d′Alsace. Dictionnaire d′histoire et d′architecture . La Nuée Bleue, Strasbourg 2013, ISBN 978-2-7165-0828-5 , pp. 353-354.
  • Gilbert Meyer: La restauration du château de Wineck . In: Annuaire de la Société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Colmar . No. 26, 1976/77, ISSN  0766-5911 , pp. 73-84.
  • August Scherlen: On the history of Wineck Castle and the village of Katzenthal . In: Yearbook of the Alsace-Lorraine Scientific Society in Strasbourg . Volume 1. 1928, pp. 80-112.
  • Felix Wolff: Alsatian Castle Lexicon. Directory of castles and chateaus in Alsace . Weidlich, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-8035-1008-2 .

Web links

Commons : Burg Wineck  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c chateauxforts-alsace.org , access on August 17 of 2010.
  2. ↑ entry PA00085470 the castle in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French), access on August 17 of 2010.
  3. ↑ a b kastel.elsass.free.fr , accessed on August 17, 2010.
  4. ↑ a b T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250) , p. 442.
  5. ↑ T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250) , p. 438.
  6. ↑ a b c Friedrich-Wilhelm Krahe: Castles of the German Middle Ages. Floor plan lexicon . Flechsig, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-88189-360-1 , p. 672.
  7. ↑ a b Entry IA68003963 of the castle in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French), accessed on August 17, 2010.
  8. ↑ T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250) , p. 441.
  9. ↑ a b T. Biller, B. Metz: The late Romanesque castle building in Alsace (1200-1250) , p. 436.

Coordinates: 48 ° 6 ′ 33.3 "  N , 7 ° 16 ′ 41.3"  E