Barby Castle
The Barby Castle is a baroque palace in Barby , a town in the Salzlandkreis in Saxony-Anhalt , whose origins go back to a border fortress of the 10th century and served as a residence since the 17th century. It was used as an educational institution from the 18th to the 20th century and has housed the Saxony-Anhalt land register archive since 1979.
history
The beginnings of the castle go back to the 10th century. In a document from King Otto I from 961, with which he gave Barby to his sister Mathilde , Abbess of Quedlinburg , a border castle in the village is mentioned for the first time. The Quedlinburg abbess enfeoffed the Barby rule with the castle.
When the Barby family of counts died out in 1680, the fief went to Duke Heinrich von Sachsen-Weißenfels . He had the old castle demolished in 1687 and erected in its place a representative three-winged new building in the baroque style according to plans by the electoral Brandenburg chief building director Johann Arnold Nering . In 1739 the south wing of the palace fell victim to a fire and was never rebuilt.
When the ducal dynasty of Sachsen-Weißenfels died out in 1746, the Evangelical Brothers Unity leased the castle from the state of Electoral Saxony and used it until 1808 a. a. as the seat of the church leadership and theological seminary. During the time of the French-ruled Kingdom of Westphalia , the castle passed into their ownership and served at times as a hospital. As a result of the Congress of Vienna , Barby and its palace fell to the Prussian state in 1815 . After the castle was initially used as a grain store, a teachers' college was set up there in 1855. In 1917 the castle was damaged again by fire.
After the end of World War II , the Soviet occupying forces confiscated the building and used it as a barracks. From 1959 to 1979 it was a reception center for resettlers or returnees from the Federal Republic and a dormitory for foreign guest workers. In 1979 the castle became the land register archive, initially for the entire GDR and later for Saxony-Anhalt. An arson attack was carried out on the archive on April 25, 1993, in which 400 linear meters of files were damaged.
After the renovation in 2006, the castle presents itself as an elongated two-storey complex. It is covered with a high mansard hipped roof. The three-and-a-half-storey central building is structured with pilasters and has a triangular gable. A balcony rests on four columns at the level of the first floor. The central building is completed by a curved mansard roof.
literature
- Georg Dehio: Handbook of German Art Monuments - Saxony-Anhalt I. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich / Berlin 2002, p. 80, ISBN 3-422-03069-7 .
Web links
- Castle history at www.stadt-barby.de
- Entry on Barby Castle in the private database "All Castles".
Individual evidence
- ^ Claudia Mai: The Theological Seminary of the Brothers' Union in Barby 1754-1789 . In: Gudrun Meyer (Ed.): Unitas Fratrum. Journal of the history and contemporary issues of the Brethren . tape 55/56 . Herrnhuter Verlag, Herrnhut, p. 111-123 .
Coordinates: 51 ° 58 ′ 10.2 ″ N , 11 ° 53 ′ 6.2 ″ E