Castle Island (Wolgast)
| Castle Island | ||
|---|---|---|
| Waters | Peenestrom | |
| Geographical location | 54 ° 3 '18 " N , 13 ° 46' 57" E | |
|
||
| length | 500 m | |
| width | 250 m | |
| surface | 10 ha | |
| Highest elevation | 2.6 m | |
The Schlossinsel is an island in the Peene River in front of the city of Wolgast . It was named after the castle, which no longer exists today and was inhabited by the Dukes of Pomerania- Wolgast until 1625 .
geography
The castle island is located at the southern end of the Spitzhörnbucht east of Wolgast in the Peene river and is separated from the city by the castle moat, which is almost eight meters wide at its narrowest point. It is about 10 hectares in size, over 500 meters long and up to 250 meters wide.
The federal road 111 and the railway line from Züssow to Swinoujscie run across the castle island . It is connected to the mainland via the Schlossgrabenbrücke as well as a pedestrian and railway bridge and to the island of Usedom via the Wolgast bridge.
The castle island is relatively flat and, apart from the embankment built for the Peene Bridge, only reaches a maximum height of about 2.6 meters. During the storm floods in 1872 , 1903, 1904 and at the turn of the year 1913/14 the island was largely flooded.
The shores of the island are largely fortified and are mainly used as jetties in the southern and western areas.
history
Starting from a Slavic hill fort , the dukes of Pomerania had a permanent castle built on a strategically located island in the Peene River in the 13th century. At the end of the 15th century, the castle began to be expanded into a palace. As a customs office, the island became an important source of income for the dukes. When the Dukes of Pomerania-Wolgast died out in 1625, the time as the main ducal residence ended. After the Thirty Years War Wolgast came to Swedish Pomerania and initially remained the administrative seat. During the Swedish-Brandenburg War , the castle was badly damaged by the subsequent explosion after a cannon hit in the powder tower in 1675. Wolgast finally lost its status as the seat of government.
During the Great Northern War , the first demolition work began in 1711. In return for an annual payment, Schlossplatz became the property of the city of Wolgast in 1739 based on a resolution by the Swedish King Friedrich . After the city was allowed to remove further parts of the castle ruins from 1798 for the extraction of building materials, all above-ground structures are said to have been removed by 1820.
In 1805/06, the Greifswald architect and university master builder Johann Gottfried Quistorp carried out a survey of the castle island. There was a suburb in the southern part of the island as early as the 16th century, as shown on a vedute on the edge of the Lubin map . Quistorp's plans to enlarge the castle island by filling it up and to completely redesign it, including the suburban area, were not carried out. The free areas were used for the port. Finally, in 1843 , after lengthy negotiations, the Kommerzienrat August Wilhelm Homeyer bought the palace square from the city and had the palace warehouse built there. Since Wolgast was an important grain transshipment point, further storage facilities and kilns were built in the following period . In the second half of the 19th century, several shipyards settled on the castle island.
In 1888 an iron foundry was built, which from 1889 had the first blast furnace in Pomerania for the production of cast steel . In the mid-1920s, the foundry had three modern blast furnaces and employed 250 to 300 workers. After the company was temporarily closed in 1931, the city acquired it. With orders in connection with the construction of the Peene Bridge in 1934, the company was able to rise again to an important steelworks in the region. The plant produced for the Reichsbahn, navy and motorway construction and manufactured a large part of the steel structures for the Berlin elevated railway . In 1937 the city sold the steelworks to the Reemtsma group . After the Second World War , the iron foundry was dismantled and brought to the Soviet Union as a reparation payment .
The northern part of the island was still used economically during GDR times. The property vacated by the dismantling of the steelworks was used by the timber industry. A construction element factory was later built here, which ceased operations in the 1990s. An eight-storey high-rise was built near the road to the island of Usedom for the administration of the Wolgast district council .
After the reunification , the industrial use of the castle island largely ended. Large parts of the factory halls were dismantled and the port area largely redesigned. In the north of the Schlossinsel, the Horn shipyard, is the oldest shipbuilding company in Wolgast. The company founded in 1895 as "Pommernwerft", later called "Wolgaster Schiffswerft", mainly manufactured fishing cutters after 1945. Today the Horn shipyard is primarily active as a repair shipyard. Since the 1990s, the port facilities and the transport routes leading across the island have been expanded. The railway line leading over the castle island and the new Peene bridge has been connecting the line from Züssow with the line to Heringsdorf since 2000 (since 2008 to today's Polish Swinoujscie ). The focus of use shifted in the direction of tourism, of which the establishment of a museum harbor on the castle moat and a marina on the northern tip of the island are examples. Since 2013, an annual concert has been held on the large open area of the castle island. In the summer of 2013 Matthias Reim performed with his album Infinite and in the summer of 2014 Roland Kaiser performed with his album Seelenbahnen.
literature
- Norbert Buske , Sabine Bock : Wolgast: ducal residence and castle, churches and chapels, port and city. Helms-Verlag, Schwerin 1995, ISBN 3-931185-05-2 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ ( Page no longer available , search in web archives: floating beds )
- ↑ a b cast steel for the Berlin elevated railways ( memento from January 5, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
- ^ Page of the Horn shipyard