Eichhof Castle (Coburg)
Eichhof Castle stands in the Coburg district of Scheuerfeld , district of Eichhof , on a small hill above the Güßbach valley and was mentioned in a document in 1440. It has been privately owned since 1979 and is run as a farm with horse breeding.
history
Peter von Eychoff was named as a naturalized citizen in the Coburg Annals in 1440 . He owned the farm of the same name in Scheuerfeld, whose owner was an Anton von Rosenau in 1516. After a short time, the farm passed into the possession of the Coburg Duke Johann Casimir .
Around 1590, Nicolaus Zech , rent master and councilor of Duke Johann Casimir of Coburg, bought the village of Scheuerfeld, which had emerged from ten former hilltop farms from the 5th and 6th centuries, and formed a manor with the so-called castle he built and the existing farms . In 1598, Duke Casimir gave him the nearby Eichhof Palace as a gift out of gratitude for the successful renovation of the court finances , which enabled the again creditworthy Casimir to generously expand Coburg. Five years later Casimir let his finance minister , however, because Prince insult in prison take, died in Zech 1607th
His children Helena and Markus inherited his property. In 1615 Helena married Johann Christian von Merklin, the son of the Coburg mayor Philipp Merklin . Helena died in 1617 giving birth to her second son, and her husband became the sole owner of the entire manor through the purchase of Markus Zech's stake. His sons shared the inheritance after his death in 1676 . The younger received Eichhof Palace, the older Scheuerfeld. Then the current castle was built.
Johann von Merklin's great-grandson, Major Friedrich Bernhard von Merklin, sold the property in 1765. In the 1830s, two-winged stables were built diagonally across from the castle. A little to one side was a square greenhouse with a tent roof. The half-timbered building housed the gardener's apartment on the upper floor. In 1864 the estate returned to the ducal possession. The Domain Office rebuilt the existing buildings for the relocation of the Prince of Ratibor again in 1895. From 1906 to 1919 the Oberhofmarschall Carl Eduard von Rüxleben lived in the castle, which remained in the property of the House of Coburg even after the severance agreement of 1919 .
architecture
The castle is a two-storey two-wing complex, consisting of a massive ground floor made of sandstone blocks and a half-timbered upper floor. The upper floor windows sit just below the eaves of the hipped roof. Originally a tower-like roof turret with a lantern rose at the meeting point of the wing firste .
The wing of the building, which was probably built at the end of the 1670s and stands in the southwest above a slope, has six to four window axes and two dormer windows on the outside . The cellar's barrel vault, which still exists, has access via a falling barrel, which could have been from the 16th century.
The narrower wing to the north-east is dated to the beginning of the 18th century. It has six window axes on the long side and three on the narrow side with a sweeping gable , which was created in 1895, like the balcony on the small corner salon. A double flight, is unifying the top spiral staircase made of cast iron that can be reached from the garden. On the upper floor there are two rooms with baroque stucco ceilings. The entrance in the corner of the two wings was built in the late 18th century as a basket arch portal with profiled transoms and two gate wings with skylights.
Murder cases
In the course of its history, Eichhof Castle hit the headlines with three murders . In 1865, when an outbuilding was demolished, the walled-in remains of a human body were found, presumably Merklin's brother, whom Merklin is said to have killed out of jealousy 200 years before the gruesome discovery, which, despite overwhelming evidence, could not be proven during his lifetime . In 1707, the then owner of Neuhof Palace , Johann Christoph von Bach, drank in the Eichhof, in which he committed a murder on the way home in Coburg for low motives in a dispute that cost him his inheritance. Finally, in August 1945, former slave laborers probably murdered the sleeping tenant of the castle, Major Erich Randt, and stole part of his property and the facility.
literature
- Fritz Mahnke: Palaces and castles in the vicinity of the Franconian Crown . Druck- und Verlagsanstalt Neue Presse, Coburg 1974, pp. 53–54
- Joachim Behrens: Under the Saxon diamond wreath . Coburger Tageblatt publishing house, 1953
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d Peter Morsbach, Otto Titz: City of Coburg. Ensembles-Architectural Monuments-Archaeological Monuments . Monuments in Bavaria. Volume IV.48. Karl M. Lipp Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-87490-590-X , p. 444.
Coordinates: 50 ° 15 ′ 43 ″ N , 10 ° 55 ′ 12 ″ E