Forchtenstein Castle

Forchtenstein sits at 511 metres above sea level, south-west of Mattersburg above the Wulka valley. Its first part, with a keep 50 metres high, was built by the Lords of Mattersdorf, who later called themselves Lords of Forchtenstein — at the beginning of the fourteenth century by some accounts, the beginning of the fifteenth by others.

The castle's Black Tower has long since lost the black rock that originally lined it. Inside it is a pit twelve metres deep, used as a cell for those condemned to death. Rezallia, wife of Lettus of Forchtenstein, is said to have used it with great frequency, and, on her husband's return from military service, to have been sentenced to death in the tower by him.

Around 1450 the male main line of the Lords of Forchtenstein died out and the castle passed to the Lower Austrian chamber administration, which held it for 170 years and pledged it to others, among them the Counts of Weißbriach and Hardegg. It came then to Archduke Albert VI, and with that became for a short time an important part of a small Habsburg principality. Little about the building changed in those years. In 1622 Nikolaus Esterházy, founder of the Forchtenstein line of the family, received the castle from Emperor Ferdinand II in an exchange, and the Esterházy were granted the title of Count.

Nikolaus set about turning the by then dilapidated castle into a fortress. He signed building contracts with the Viennese master builder Simone Retacco for the years 1630 to 1634, and from 1643 with the foreman Domenico Carlone. The building specialists were all Italians, and the work brought a large order to three masters of Kaisersteinbruch, the imperial quarry: Ambrosius Petruzzy, Pietro Maino Maderno and Mathias Lorentisch. Their Kaiserstein went into the main portals, the fountains and the cannonballs, delivered once hewn on large wagons drawn by six oxen.

In the second half of the seventeenth century his son Paul carried the building further to Carlone's plans, with weight given to the artistic decoration; the sheer number of rebuildings left the castle, at its present extent, effectively a baroque one. In the second half of the eighteenth century the master builder Johann Ferdinand Mödlhammer extended it slightly, raising the roof truss and renovating the interiors.

After Paul's death the castle's purpose changed. It housed the military equipment of the Esterházy troops, booty gathered over three centuries and an extensive portrait collection, along with archives, clocks, machines and preparations of exotic animals. Paul I had already assembled valuables and rarities in what became the treasure chamber — timepieces, stone-cut goblets, ivory work. Those rooms could be reached only by a secret and secured passage, and the door needed two different keys turned together, one held by the Count and the other by his treasurer.

The treasure chamber came through the Second World War and the occupation that followed it intact, the cabinets keeping their original glass panes. It is reckoned the last baroque chamber of art and curiosities in Europe still on its original site, and the armoury the largest in private hands anywhere in Europe.

In 1919, under the Hungarian Soviet Republic, state officials confiscated some 280 objects from the Esterházy treasure chamber at Forchtenstein and took them to Budapest, where they remain. After the republic fell the Hungarian state concluded a loan agreement with the Esterházy covering them; the Esterházy Private Foundation holds that since 2019 Hungary has no longer kept fully to that agreement, and has been pressing for the objects' return.

When the Esterházy estates were divided into a Hungarian and an Austrian part in 1921, part of the archive stayed at Forchtenstein and at Eisenstadt while the rest travelled by way of Ödenburg and Eszterháza to the Hungarian State Archive in Budapest. The Burgspiele Forchtenstein were staged at the castle each year from 1954 to 1983. The castle is a listed monument in Austria and belongs to the Esterházy Private Foundation, which sets out the history and treasures of the house here and at Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt. The treasure chamber, until then reserved, was opened regularly to visitors for the first time in 2005 and can be seen on guided tours, alongside exhibitions on the castle's art and on military equipment.