Thurnau Castle

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View of Thurnau Castle, seaside

Thurnau Castle is a castle and palace complex in Thurnau ( Kulmbach district ) in Upper Franconia. It is one of the largest and most important palace complexes in Northern Bavaria with construction phases from the 13th to the 19th century.

Building history

Bower and covered corridor to the church
Thurnau Castle, prayer bay on the bower, 1904
Carl August Lebschée, floor plan of Thurnau Castle, 1854
Giech-Giech alliance coat of arms at Thurnau Castle

The oldest part of the castle is the bower , the "Hus uf dem Stein", from the 13th century. It was built by the knight Förtsch von Thurnau and stands on a sandstone rock that extends to the third floor. The later extension of the bower can be seen on the facade. Between 1430 and 1477 the archive building and a residential wing were added. In 1566 the Förtsch died out and the castle passed to the noble families Giech and Künsberg , who shared the complex as Ganerbeburg . Both families built new wings with the bower in the middle.

In 1581 Hans Georg von Giech had Hans Schlachter add a prayer bay to the bower and from 1600 to 1606 he built the Hans-Georgen-Bau in Renaissance style . The changes after earning the dignity of count in 1695 were numerous: Karl Gottfried I von Giech had a representative stuccoed hall set up on the upper floor of the Hans-Georgen-Building and built the new church with the magnificent lordship gallery from 1701 to 1706. Between 1729 and 1731 the baroque Carl Maximilian building was added to the upper court. Inside is the so-called Schönburg Hall with landscape wallpaper from the end of the 18th century, which Christian Carl Ernst Heinrich von Giech had set up for his wife Caroline von Schönburg -W Wechselburg , who came from Saxony .

The complex is divided around the upper and lower courtyard, which are connected by a gate in the Storchenbäulein. Both courtyards have a separate entrance from the site. The bower with facades on both courtyards dominates the entire ensemble. On the south side are the Cent Tower and the White Tower. Two wooden covered passages connect the north-eastern round tower with the church and the bower with the Hans-Georgen-Bau.

In 1833 the gatehouse burned down and was rebuilt in neo-Gothic forms by 1837. At the end of the 1830s, Count Hermann Giech set up an archive room at the lower courtyard and the ancestral hall in the Hans-Georgen-Bau, and around 1840 the tea house in the palace garden. A special feature are the charming wooden galleries that connect the gate with the north-east tower and this in turn with the church; the previously simple wooden corridors were also decorated in a neo-Gothic style in the 1850s and provided with larger windows.

Residents and users

The builders and first residents were the Förtsch knights . After their extinction, the castle and the lordship were transferred to the von Künsberg and von Giech families as a condominium . After they had initially shared the castle and property by mutual agreement, the castle and the villages belonging to the lordship were divided up in 1576 after the first disputes between the two families. Only the Thurnau market remained under joint management.

In the 150 years that followed, the relationship between the two resident families and their servants was often tense. In 1688 the disputes escalated and a shootout broke out between the two parties, after which a Künsberg servant succumbed to his wounding. Christian Carl I. von Giech then left Thurnau to protect himself from legal prosecution and lived in Buchau, Wiesentfels and Nuremberg until his death . In 1731, the conflict was finally resolved when the Giechs, who were raised to imperial counts in 1695, bought half of the castle from the Künsbergs and were now the sole owners and residents of the castle. Without the 165-year-old common residents from 1566 to 1731 and at the same time competition from both families, the enormous size of the castle would not be explainable. When moving out, it was determined that the Giechs would have to receive all Künsberg's coats of arms on and in the building.

In 1919 the last count, Friedrich Karl von Giech, moved out of the castle and moved to Wiesentfels Castle . He died in 1938 without children. Thereafter, the castle was inherited by his nephews, the barons Karl Gottfried and Siegfried Hiller von Gaertringen from Reppersdorf / Lower Silesia. They came from a Württemberg mail nobility family whose roots lie in Pöttmes near Augsburg. It has been located at Schloss Gärtringen near Stuttgart since 1634 and was elevated to Baron Hiller von Gaertringen in 1703. Both heirs died as soldiers in World War II. The former's underage son, Johann Christian Hiller von Gaertringen, was the heir to the palace. In 1945 it was used as accommodation for numerous refugee families, many of them from the Silesian homeland of the heirs.

Over 80 people lived in the castle at that time. These residents who fled to Thurnau in the immediate post-war period included the Berlin classics philologist Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen , the pianist Wilhelm Kempff , who had fled Potsdam , the violinist Gerhard Taschner and members of the Silesian noble families Count von Haslingen called von Schickfus, Gersdorff , Nostitz , Schwerin and Sprenger . By the beginning of the 1950s, the castle was emptied of refugees again. As a result, the owner family carried out numerous renovation measures. In 1969 Johann Christian Hiller von Gaertringen sold Wiesentfels Castle and Buchau Castle . In 1975 the family moved out of Thurnau Castle and transferred it to the Gräflich Giech'sche Spitalstiftung . Parts of it were also given to the University of Bayreuth for use. Since then, it has undergone extensive restoration with state funding.

Gräflich Giech'sche family collections

Collections
Thurnau castle 2016 0059.jpg
Thurnau castle 2016 0066.jpg

In 1857, the Count Carl von Giech established the Count Carl von Giech's family collections in Kemenate and Hans-Georgen-Bau as a public private museum, one of the oldest castle museums in Bavaria. The museum included the “Red Room” with the prayer bay, the rifle room and the weapons collection in the “Church Room” (the room at the transition to the church), the ancestral hall with around 200 portraits of the Giech family and related or related families and the library 30,000 volumes, which was housed in the White Tower and two adjoining rooms. The natural material collection, which mainly included an extensive mineral collection, was set up in the defense tower at the Zwinger.

In 1862, at the instigation of Count Carl, a detailed guide through the museum was written and prepared for printing, but it was not published the following year due to the Count's surprising death. Two copies of the manuscript have survived. By 1938, over 6,000 visitors signed the museum's visitor books, which remained closed due to the death of the last Count Friedrich Karl and later due to the occupation of the palace with refugees around 1945.

The heirs of the collections, the Hiller von Gaertringen family, have been actively trying since 2009 to return the collections stored since the 1970s to Thurnau Castle. The bower is intended as the exhibition location. Some of the showpieces sold by the last Count Giech in the 1920s and the weapons collection that was auctioned in the 1970s are missing from the original holdings of the collections. Despite these losses, the Giech collections are extremely important and diverse in terms of culture and local history, with several thousand objects. In spring 2016 there was an exhibition in the Thurnau Pottery Museum entitled Wake Up! The collections of Count Giech from Thurnau Castle took place, which had about 2000 visitors.

Today's use of the castle

The Hans-Georgen-Bau is currently used by the Research Institute for Music Theater at the University of Bayreuth and the Institute for Franconian Regional History at the Universities of Bayreuth and Bamberg. A hotel is housed in the Carl Maximilian Building. Events take place in the former carriage house and in the stables . The rest of the castle, including the bower, is empty. The prayer bay was extensively renovated in 2015-17.

Castle garden

The castle garden was located south of the castle, above the Herrnmühlenbach. In the spring of 1706, Count Karl Gottfried I von Giech had an avenue of lime trees planted in the so-called rock garden for the then popular Baille-Maille game. In 1758 an orangery was added in the Koppengarten to the east. Not far from this building with a large glass facade was the so-called botanical corner with tree rarities such as elephant cane, tree of life and antler tree . The orangery was demolished in 1948. In July 1968 the lime tree avenue, which was more than 250 years old at the time, with 62 old linden trees at the time, fell almost completely victim to a hurricane-like storm. Nowadays the former castle garden has run wild. Even the tea house forfeited the counts Giech from the mid-19th century. Stone benches and rococo sculptures from the Thurnau castle garden are located in the garden of Weiher Castle near Hollfeld.

photos

  • Gatehouse and bower

  • Lower lock

  • Castle courtyard

  • Well in the yard

  • Portrait of Wolf Förtsch von Thurnau

literature

  • Friedrich Wilhelm Anton Layritz: Contribution to the history of the Förtschen von Thurnau . sn, Bayreuth 1796, online .
  • Uso Künssberg: History of the Künssberg-Thurnau family. sn, Munich 1838, online .
  • August Schlegel: 1000 years of the market and Thurnau Castle. A reflection of the natural landscape and its cultural history . Market town council, Thurnau 1965.
  • Uta von Pezold: The rule of Thurnau in the 18th century. Friends of Plassenburg, Kulmbach 1968 ( Die Plassenburg 27, ZDB -ID 504385-2 ), (also: Phil. Diss., Erlangen 1968).
  • Uta von Pezold: Thurnau. A little guide through its history . Thurnau 1987
  • Uta von Pezold: The landscape wallpapers in Thurnau Castle. Häussinger, Thurnau 1989.
  • Bruno Hager (Ed.): Thurnau. 1239-1989 . Markt Thurnau, Thurnau 1989, ISBN 3-922808-30-1 .
  • Georg Schwarz: The Thurnau Castle. Description, historical development, builders. Government of Upper Franconia, Bayreuth 1990 ( Official school gazette of the Upper Franconian government district. Local supplement 170, ZDB -ID 583304-8 ).
  • Thomas Münch among others: The Thurnau market with its districts . Geiger, Horb am Neckar 1993, ISBN 3-89264-785-2 .
  • Uta von Pezold: Thurnau Castle. Castle complex in Franconian Switzerland and the Lords of Giech. In: Arx . 28, 1, 2006, ISSN  0394-0624 , pp. 29-33.
  • Marion von Butler: War time in Silesian homeland and flight in January 1945 . Private printing, Heldritt 2006
  • Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen / Karl Hiller von Gaertringen (ed.): Wake up! The collections of Count Giech from Thurnau Castle. Berlin / Munich 2016

Web links

Commons : Schloss Thurnau  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ North Bavarian Courier
  2. ↑ Youtube
  3. ^ Kulmbach district


Coordinates: 50 ° 1 ′ 27.5 ″  N , 11 ° 23 ′ 44.9 ″  E