Burg Kreuzenstein

Like most castles in Lower Austria, Kreuzenstein's origins go back to the 12th century. It was built by the Counts of Formbach — the Bavarian Vornbach — and passed by marriage to the Counts of Wasserburg. Through Ottokar II of Bohemia the castle came into Habsburg possession in 1278, on a height above Leobendorf commanding a wide view over the Danube and the Korneuburg basin.

In July 1527 the Anabaptist preacher Balthasar Hubmaier, arrested under the pretext of stirring riots in Mikulov in Moravia, was brought to Kreuzenstein and interrogated there. He refused to recant, was condemned to death, and was burned at the stake in Vienna on 10 March 1528.

Until the Thirty Years' War the castle had never been taken. In the war's final phase Swedish forces occupied much of Lower Austria and pushed towards Vienna, and on 4 April 1645 Colonel Lukas Spicker — commander of both Kreuzenstein and the fortress of Korneuburg — was summoned to hand over both strongholds. With too few troops to resist, Spicker complied at once, surrendering castle and town without a fight on 5 April to the Swedes under Field Marshal Lennart Torstensson.

When the Swedish main army began withdrawing into Moravia at the end of September 1645, Torstensson ordered Kreuzenstein blown up. The charges were set at three points — some accounts say four — and the castle was left a ruin, its walls serving the surrounding farmers as a quarry for building stone.

The ruin came in the 18th century to the Counts of Wilczek, whose fortune rested on their large Silesian coal mines. From 1874 Count Johann Nepomuk Wilczek, best known as a polar explorer, rebuilt the castle on the original site in a style entirely different from the medieval castle it replaced, folding the surviving medieval fabric — parts of the ring wall, the stump of the east tower and parts of the chapel — into the new building. A practised eye can still tell the medieval masonry from the 19th-century additions. The architect Carl Gangolf Kayser, court architect to Maximilian I of Mexico, directed the work until his death in 1895, succeeded by Humbert Walcher von Molthein and the artist Egon Rheinberger.

Wilczek gathered original medieval components from across Europe and built them in. The largest is the Kaschauer Gang, a tracery arcade of about 1450 that once formed the west gallery of the cathedral in Košice, whose original stones Wilczek bought cheaply during the cathedral's 1895 renovation; a spiral staircase of 1555 from the Renaissance palace of Göllersdorf climbs from the courtyard to the roof. The castle was fitted out with a great collection of medieval furnishings, including one of the oldest surviving medieval catapults, purchased from Hohensalzburg. A family vault was built beneath the castle, where Wilczek himself lies buried. The work lasted thirty years; Kaiser Wilhelm II attended the reopening on 6 June 1906.

A lightning strike in 1915 burned out part of the archive and library wing. Worse came in 1945, when the fighting between the German Wehrmacht and the Red Army badly damaged several rooms and many pieces of the collection were stolen; a number of the Wilczek manuscripts are now held in the Austrian National Library.

The castle remains in Wilczek hands and is open as a museum, with the Adlerwarte Kreuzenstein flying its birds of prey on the hill from April to October. Film crews have worked here for over a century: Max Reinhardt shot parts of Das Mirakel at the castle in 1912, among the earliest films made on real locations rather than solely in a studio, and Kreuzenstein has since stood in for castles in Mario Bava's Baron Blood (1972), The Prisoner of Zenda (1979), The Pillars of the Earth (2009), The Witcher (2019) and Shardlake (2023).