Slavic castle Tornow
| Slavic castle Tornow | ||
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| Creation time : | from 7th century | |
| Castle type : | Niederungsburg, Slavonic ramparts | |
| Conservation status: | Burgstall | |
| Place: | Calau - Zinnitz | |
| Geographical location | 51 ° 48 '52.7 " N , 13 ° 51' 22.4" E | |
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The former Slavic castle Tornow is the stables of a Slavic castle wall in Niederlausitz. Together with the eponymous village of Tornow , it was completely destroyed by lignite mining in the 1960s to 1980s. The location of the castle was in the Schrakeniederung, three kilometers north of Zinnitz , a district of Calau in the district of Oberspreewald-Lausitz and is still marked as a castle wall in old maps. According to the GDR researcher Joachim Herrmann, the ring-shaped complex was specified in 1965 as being built in the 7th or 8th century and is said to have existed until the 9th century. In the meantime, a number of dendrodata are available from Niederlausitz castle walls, which prove that it was not made until the end of the 9th century, so that the thesis put forward by Hermann of castle building has to be abandoned since the 7th century. It was probably destroyed by fire in the Liutizen uprising of 983. The associated settlement existed until the High Middle Ages. Nearby is the reconstructed Slavic hill fort Raddusch .
Location and origin
The former Slavic ramparts lay in flat terrain on a flat, swampy peninsula right next to a Slavic settlement and was built as a refuge at the end of the 9th century (according to Hermann, in the 7th century) . Especially in spring, the area around the facility was soaked and impassable. The site was accessible in dry seasons. Excavations in Tornow and Wiesenau showed that these castles of the Tornow type were not built by the supporters of the older Slavic wave of immigration ( Sukow-Szeligi and Prager groups), but only arose during the course of the second wave of immigration (Tornow group). Since the exact chronology of the building history of the Tornower Burgwall is not yet known, the immediate reason for the construction is unknown in the historical context. Another very similar rampart in the vicinity was the Slavic castle Vorberg , which is only about five kilometers away. Slavic castles of this type, each with settlements in front of them, have also been identified from Wiesenau , Schönfeld and Presenchen . There are several construction phases of the settlement, Tornow A to D, which existed from the 7th or 8th century to the 12th century. However, the castle itself went down in a fire in the 9th century and was not rebuilt afterwards.
Tornow A.
The older system (Tornow A) was built in the 9th, perhaps as early as the 7th or 8th century, using a grate structure made of tree trunks, with the stability being achieved by branch hooks. The ring-shaped wall consisted of 14 to 16 layers of wood, stacked in a rust-like manner , which were filled with earth. The height of the wall was about five to six meters, the front was covered with clay to protect the wood from the weather. At the same time, this made it difficult for attackers to climb the embankment or set the wooden structure on fire. At the front of the rampart were two battlements, one above the other, which ran around the ring-shaped rampart. The platform of the lower battlement was at a height of about 3.5 m, while the upper battlement was about 2 m higher on the apex of the rampart. There were accommodations on the inside of the wall. In front of the wall itself, a ditch at least seven meters wide and filled with groundwater made direct access to the wall difficult. The height difference between the bottom of the trench and the top of the wall was at least seven meters. A special berm was not necessary as the wall was evidently very stable. Between the foot of the rampart and the ditch there was only a one to two meter wide strip. A tunnel-shaped gate led through the wall on the southwest side. It was 2 m wide, at least 2.5 m high and could be locked. It was accessible from the outside via a wooden bridge that crossed the moat. At the transition from the tunnel to the inner courtyard there was a kink where the corridor could also be closed. The round inner courtyard itself was 25 m in diameter. Around the courtyard on the rampart there were ring-shaped accommodations about 2.4 m wide over a length of about 85 m. These accommodations were only used in times of crisis. In the courtyard itself there was a well and a grinder house for grinding grain. Apparently the only permanently inhabited house in the complex was on the inside of the wall at the mouth of the gate tunnel. It had an area of around 20 square meters and was likely to have served as a residence for the castle administrator or village chief. Grain was stored on the top floor of the house.
The lord's farm yard was directly in front of the castle and consisted of a house with a cellar and some farm buildings where ceramics and iron were manufactured or processed. In the village in front of the castle, which consisted of eight large houses, around 300 people are believed to have lived, who found refuge in the castle in the event of an attack.
Tornow B.
The rampart of the first castle complex (Tornow A) was destroyed together with the associated settlement. A second plant (Tornow B) was built in the same place in the 8th or at the latest in the early 9th century. This was more clearly designed as a noble residence and included a 30 square meter house with a basement in the courtyard. 19 storage buildings were laid out around the house, which largely filled the courtyard. There was also accommodation in three storage buildings. The gate tunnel that pierced the wall led upwards and overcame a height difference of two meters, with the interior of the castle being higher than the outer sole of the torso. The castle should have provided living space for the lord of the castle together with around 15 warriors. In front of the castle was the lord's court with a few workshops and farm buildings. In addition, another workshop district was created. The large houses in the Tornow A settlement were replaced by smaller houses.
Tornow C and D
After the castle complex (Tornow B) was burned down together with the associated settlement in the 9th century, only the village was rebuilt. The farm yard received a large residential building. There were seven farmsteads at some distance from the Adelshof, but the separate workshop district did not emerge again.
literature
- Joachim Herrmann: The Slavs in Germany. History and culture of the Slavic tribes west of Oder and Neisse from the 6th to 12th centuries. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1985, ISBN 978-3-05-000126-5 .
- K.-D. Hunter: The large remains of plants from the Tornow castle wall excavation, Kr. Calau. In: J. Hermann: Tornow and Vorberg. A contribution to the early history of Lausitz. Berlin 1966.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ TK25 sheet 4149 Luebbenau (1901). (No longer available online.) In: Geogreif - map collection. Archived from the original on May 11, 2013 ; accessed in April 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ 1995 Brandenburg History, page 76, Ingo Materna, Wolfgang Ribbe, Kurt Adamy, 1995
- ↑ Joachim Herrmann: The Lutizen uprising of 983 - background and effects . In: Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR (Hrsg.): Das Altertum . tape 29 . Akademie-Verlag, 1983, ISSN 0002-6646 , p. 5-25 .
- ↑ Hermann, p. 204
- ↑ Hermann, p. 207 f.
- ↑ Hermann, p. 206 f.
- ↑ Hermann, p. 172 ff.
- ↑ Hermann, p. 258
- ↑ Hermann, pp. 204-206
- ^ Hermann, p. 206
- ↑ Hermann, p. 258
