Kufstein Fortress

The fortress enters the record in 1205, in a document that calls it Castrum Caofstein and shows it held by the Bavarian duke Ludwig and the bishop of Regensburg. It sits on the Festungsberg, a rock 90 metres high directly above the Inn and the town, 507 metres above sea level. Bavaria and the Tyrol fought over the place bitterly: in 1336 Margrave Charles of Moravia had to break off his pursuit of the Bavarians when the fortress blocked his route.

In 1342 Margarete “Maultasch”, Duchess of the Tyrol, was given Kufstein as a wedding present by her husband Louis of Brandenburg, son of the Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria — the first time the place belonged to the Tyrol. When Margarete handed the whole of the Tyrol to the Habsburg duke Rudolph IV in 1363, the Bavarians demanded the return of that wedding gift and invaded Kufstein successfully.

From 1415 Duke Louis VII of Bavaria, Ludwig the Bearded, set about strengthening the defences. In 1504, during the Landshut War of Succession, the future Emperor Maximilian I besieged town and fortress and took both. Maximilian had the works renewed and built up into a fortress, and the massive round tower was raised between 1518 and 1522, adding substantially to what the place could withstand.

In 1703, during the War of the Spanish Succession, Bavarian troops overran the Tyrol and took Kufstein; they had to give it up again in 1704, after the Tyrolean peasantry rose against the occupation, though the Bavarian tenure is sometimes counted as running unbroken from 1703 to 1805. Under the Peace of Pressburg the fortress passed with the rest of the Tyrol into Bavarian hands in 1805, and came back to Austria in 1814 with the collapse of Napoleon's empire.

Under the Habsburgs the fortress held political prisoners, and its name is written deep into Hungarian history. The nobleman Miklós Wesselényi was confined here from 1785 to 1789, the poet János Batsányi from 1794 to 1796, the poet László Szentjóbi Szabó in 1795, and Ferenc Kazinczy, the champion of the Hungarian language, from 1799 to 1800. Later inmates included the teacher Klára Leövey, the evangelical bishop Máté Haubner, the Protestant preacher György Gaál from 1850 to 1856, the educator Countess Blanka Teleki from 1853 to 1856, and the revolutionary Sándor Rózsa, known as Hungary's Robin Hood, from 1859 to 1865. Some hundred of the Poles arrested after the Kraków Uprising of 1846 were also held in the fortress.

The town of Kufstein has owned the fortress since 1924. In 1931 an open-air organ, the Heldenorgel, was installed in the Bürgerturm as a memorial to the dead of the First World War; enlarged in 2009, it is reckoned the largest open-air organ in the world, and its ten-minute recital at midday, audible across the town, commemorates the dead of both world wars and all victims of violence. The instrument is mentioned in the James Bond novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

The former barracks range houses the Kufstein town museum, whose collections include Bronze Age and Stone Age finds from the Tischofer Höhle, while the Josefsburg, given a movable roof in 2005, is used for concerts and events; a long rock gallery is open to the public as a casemate, and the castle well is some 60 metres deep. The climb from the town can be made on foot or by the Panoramabahn Kaiser Maximilian. The fortress is a listed monument and protected as cultural property under the Hague Convention. The town has leased it out since 1996; the Austrian Court of Audit objected to the terms of that arrangement, which was amended in 2019, and the operating company has since traded as Festung Kufstein GmbH.