Anhalt Castle

The castle stands on the Großer Hausberg between Meisdorf and Mägdesprung, above the Selke valley in the lower Harz. It was probably built by Count Otto of Ballenstedt of the Saxon House of Ascania, whose grandfather Count Esico, named in a 1036 deed of Emperor Conrad II, had ruled in the Saxon Schwabengau and the adjacent Saxon Eastern March. Otto assumed comital rights in Saxony after his father, Count Adalbert II, was assassinated in 1080; he married Eilika, daughter of Duke Magnus of Saxony, and launched several campaigns against the Polabian Slavs. Shortly before his death in 1123 he turned the collegiate church at Ballenstedt into a Benedictine abbey and had Anhalt Castle erected as the dynasty's ancestral seat, from which the Ascanian Principality of Anhalt took its name. It was one of three Ascanian ancestral castles, with Aschersleben and Ballenstedt.

The castle is first mentioned in 1140, while Otto's son Albert the Bear was fighting the rival Welf dynasty for the Saxon ducal title: the fortress was destroyed by the forces of Conrad of Querfurt, Archbishop of Magdeburg and Margrave Conrad of Meissen. The first castle had consisted mainly of a round residential tower 18 metres in diameter.

Albert had it rebuilt after 1147, and the new complex was one of the mightiest fortifications in the Harz region, on a scale comparable to the Wartburg in Thuringia. The dry moat and its outer rampart, the Vorwall, ran 543 metres around the works, and the castle was built of brick, a material untypical of its time and area. Legend derives the name from the Middle Low German An-Holt, "(built) without wood".

The title Prince of Anhalt, first attested in 1215, referred to the castle; the name passed from it to the princely house in the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, and only in the modern era came to denote a territory. At the partition of the Principality of Anhalt in 1252 the castle fell to the elder Aschersleben line, which used it as its principal seat. That line died out in 1315, ending the castle's great period, though the Stammer family still lived there as Burgmannen in the 15th century. Five hundred metres east, on the Kleiner Hausberg, stood a smaller 13th- and 14th-century work known as the little Anhalt.

Once Anhalt was given up, Harzgerode — whose castle is first mentioned in 1326 — became the Ascanian centre of the Oberfürstentum. The village of Anhalt south of the castle, first recorded in 1311, supplied the garrison and was also a place of iron-ore mining and smelting; it was abandoned in the middle of the 15th century, and its church bells were taken to Harzgerode in 1440.

In 1682 Prince Friedrich of Anhalt-Harzgerode had a Vorwerk laid out on the deserted village's land. In 1822 Duke Alexius Friedrich Christian of Anhalt-Bernburg had the ruined ground on the Großer Hausberg cleared and a neo-Gothic well house set over the excavated well; the castle's power to name and shape the identity of the land made it a subject of legend and poetry in that century. Excavations followed from 1901 under the Brunswick Baurat Brinckmann. What remains are a few wall sections of the castle chapel, living quarters and outbuildings, and the roughly three-metre stump of the bergfried.

Large parts of the premises were restored and made accessible to the public in 2012 for the 800th anniversary of the founding of the principality of Anhalt, and on 30 June that year a memorial was dedicated at the castle by the deputy Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt in the presence of Prince Eduard of Anhalt. A dig in the summer of 2017 in the deserted village recovered the remains of a smelting furnace dated to the 12th or 13th century. The ruin is a protected Kulturdenkmal near Harzgerode in the Harz district of Saxony-Anhalt, and is checkpoint no. 197 in the Harzer Wandernadel hiking system.