Castle canal

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Gracht Castle - mansion

The water lock canal in Erftstadt- Liblar is one of the surge tanks of Cologne space. It is a two-part complex with a three-wing bailey and a two- wing mansion . The garden of the palace was probably laid out at the beginning of the 18th century by the Münster horticultural master Gottfried Laurenz Pictorius based on the French model and in the 19th century its rear parts were redesigned in the style of an English landscape park.

For four centuries, the mansion belonged to the Wolff-Metternich family , who had their headquarters there until 1957. Several famous people were born in the castle. B. 1658 Franz Arnold von Wolff-Metternich zu Gracht the Prince-Bishop of Paderborn (there successor of his uncle Hermann Werner von Wolff-Metternich zu Gracht ) and Munster; and in 1829 the freedom fighter of 1848 and later US Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz .

history

Gracht Palace around 1860, Alexander Duncker collection

In its beginnings, Gracht Castle was not a knight's seat , but just a side courtyard of the Buschfeld House . In 1433 Otto von Buschfeld inherited the house and farm from his father Hermann. The two-part castle complex was built around 1500. Otto's granddaughter, Catharina von Buschfeld, inherited the property in 1538 with her husband Hieronymus Wolff called von Metternich.

Her grandson Johann Adolf I was raised to the baron status and received Liblar in 1633 from the Cologne elector Ferdinand as subordinate rule. He began in 1658 with the expansion of the Gracht house into a representative castle. His descendants continued the expansion and completed it in such a way that the ancestral seat of the Wolff-Metternich family was then classified as a manor suitable for the Landtag.

After Schloss Gracht had served as a military hospital for several years during the time of the French administration (since 1795) and was then left in a ruined state, construction measures to maintain the complex became inevitable.

On behalf of Levin Anton Graf Wolff Metternich, today's mansion was built according to plans by the Cologne architect Johann Anton Wallee between 1851 and 1854. The previously two-story east wing of the building was raised by one floor and a flanking four-story tower was built. Furthermore, the house was expanded to include a two-story south wing with a three-story corner tower. Parts of the previous buildings from 1698 were integrated into the neo-Gothic style of the new outer bailey after a fire .

The municipality of Liblar acquired the complex with the castle park and lands in 1957, and in 1962 the castle was sold on. After several changes of ownership, a group of Rhenish entrepreneurs acquired the castle in 1973, which housed the university seminar of business after 1976 (after extensive restoration was completed). In 2004 it was integrated into the European School of Management and Technology (ESMT Berlin) founded in 2002 . MARGA Business Simulations, a spin-off of ESMT Berlin and provider of entrepreneur online business simulation games, is also based there. ESMT Berlin, which wants to concentrate on the Berlin location, sold Schloss Gracht on November 30, 2018. The successors want to expand the castle into a center for stress medicine.

New operator

Schloss Gracht GmbH operates the private acute clinic for psychodynamic psychiatry, psychotherapy and psychosomatics. Schloss Gracht GmbH was founded in November 2018 and is based in Erftstadt near Cologne.

Castle Park

The public, listed, 9-hectare castle park with its old and partly exotic trees (for example some older mountain sequoia trees ) has been looked after by the Gracht Castle Park Association since 1996 and, with their help, returned to its historical baroque state. The fact that the park became a founding member of the Route of Garden Art between the Rhine and the Maas in 2004 shows that this work is being recognized .

  • Moat and renewed bridge to the main house

  • Adjacent house with moat

  • Wolff-Metternich coat of arms on the manor house

  • Gargoyles on the manor house

  • Neo-Gothic style bailey

  • Burg zur Gracht 1642, detail after Matthäus Merian d. Ä.

  • Baroque garden 1730 after pen drawing by Renier Roidkin

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Management MARGA Business Simulations , accessed on October 28, 2014
  2. ↑ Horst Komuth: Change of ownership Gracht Castle in Erftstadt becomes the Center for Stress Medicine, Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Rhein-Erft from May 4, 2018
  3. ↑ on the park: Report by Sabine Boebé from the Förderverein, quoted in the Kölner Stadtanzeiger, Rhein-Erft-Journal, September 10, 2007 (after the Open Monument Day)

literature

in alphabetical order by authors / editors

  • Sabine Boebé: Gracht castle and park in Erftstadt-Liblar = Rheinische Kunststätten 355. Neuss (Neuss printing and publishing company) 1990. ISBN 3-88094-636-1
  • Nadja Hormisch: The garden of Gracht Castle in Erftstadt-Liblar . In: Landschaftsverband Rheinland (Hrsg.): Garden art in the Rhineland . Petersberg (Michael Imhof) 2003, ISBN 3-935590-94-6 , pages 113–117 (= workbook of the Rhenish preservation of monuments, no. 60).
  • Claudia Anneliese Jung: The baroque gardens of Schloss Gracht in Liblar . In: Die Gartenkunst  23 (2/2011), pp. 215–248.
  • Association for the promotion of the university seminar of the economy (Hrsg.): Schloß Gracht. Preservation of monuments as a living task . Cologne (Greven & Bechtold) 1981.

Web links

Commons : Schloss Gracht  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 50 ° 48 ′ 41.6 "  N , 6 ° 48 ′ 53.3"  E