Burgdorf Castle

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Burgdorf Castle

The Burgdorf Castle is a castle from the 11th century at the highest point of the city Burgdorf in the canton of Bern in Switzerland . As one of the largest high aristocratic castles of the Hohenstaufen era , it is, together with Thun Castle and a few other facilities in Switzerland, the secular counterpart of the large Romanesque churches, and thus a monument of national importance. Since 2020 there has been a youth hostel , a restaurant and a new museum in the castle .

history

Burgdorf (around 1850)

The unique topographical situation led to fortifications in early history and later to the formation of legends. The high medieval fortress was first mentioned in a document in 1130. Together with the Burgundian property, the castle passed to the Counts of Rheinfelden in the 11th century and to the Dukes of Zähringen in 1090.

Berchtold V. von Zähringen's major expansion of the palace around 1200 into a palatinate residence wanted to turn the palace into the southern center of the planned Zähringen territorial state astride the Rhine . With the death of Berchtold in 1218 the state structure broke up; the inheritance on the south side of the Rhine passed to the Counts of Kyburg . Burgdorf Castle was the center of their western possessions; the decline of the counts led to the siege of Burgdorf by Bern and the Confederates in 1383 - with the first use of artillery in Switzerland.

In 1384, Bern bought the castle and the Burgdorf estate from the impoverished Kyburgers. The castle has been the seat of the Bernese district administration for 623 years, only interrupted from 1798 to 1804, when Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi ran his internationally famous educational institute here. Until 1798 it was the seat of the Bernese bailiff , u. a. by Friedrich Bondeli (1705–1761), the father of Julie Bondeli . It has been the seat of the Castle Museum since 1885, which means that the most important rooms and towers are always accessible to the public. In the second half of the 20th century, the governor's office , court and regional prison were housed in the castle. In 2012, the cantonal administration left the castle as a result of a cantonal administrative reform.

As the headquarters of the Zähring ducal family, which was decisive for the founding of the State of Bern and which was immortalized on the castle with a famous inscription, Burgdorf Castle played a central, constitutive role in the formation of the State of Bern. The city of Bern was founded from here.

Castle seen from the upper town

History of architecture and art

patio

The castle, which is divided into the main and outer bailey, has preserved all the essential parts from its main construction period. The rational, systematic distribution of the main volumes created around 1200 has remained dominant and the combination of cubic structures in a dominant height is still effective. The Vorburg consists of the gate tower, an annular wall with battlements and a 45 m deep Sodbrunnen . The main castle consists of a square keep , a high residential and defense tower , a south and north wing, which are surrounded by massive circular walls with two half-shell towers on the north side.

Two freestanding high defense towers and a massive defensive wall from the 13th century flanked by a moat, rampart and smaller towers protect the castle plateau from the north. To the south are the representative large buildings of the four-storey palas and the hall, which contained a total of three large halls, of which the smallest, today's so-called knight's hall , has been preserved. In the 16th century, the volume of the largest hall in the hall was divided into two floors and numerous individual rooms (today the court and governor's office). There were two castle chapels, the smaller of which has been preserved with its Gothic frescoes . In the hall there is a Romanesque knight's hall and a chapel with frescoes from around 1330, which show scenes from the life of John the Baptist as well as parts from the story of the Passion .

A defense tower

The keep and the palace from the second half of the 12th century are among the earliest brick buildings in Switzerland . The main construction phase of the castle in Zähringen opens up post-Roman brick production in Switzerland. The quality of the brick bond, originally worked on the outside and inside, is astonishing; the dominant red coloring of the main buildings is a princely symbol to the outside. Bern followed on from this splendor when the Palas received a new roof structure around 1430 and its huge roof areas with glazed tiles were given geometric patterns. The careful handling that characterizes Bern's building policy in Burgdorf and is testimony to the fact that Bern saw itself as the legal successor to the royal houses has preserved this main monument of medieval secular architecture in Switzerland for centuries.

literature

See also

Web links

Commons : Burgdorf Castle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 47 ° 3 '18 "  N , 7 ° 37' 45"  E ; CH1903:  six hundred and fourteen thousand four hundred seventy-seven  /  two hundred and eleven thousand five hundred and seventy

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Burgdorf Castle | Burgdorf Castle will be open to everyone from Saturday, June 13th. Retrieved June 13, 2020 (German).
  2. ^ Burgdorf Castle | History. Retrieved June 13, 2020 (German).