Germany · Partial ruin
Wettin Castle
Burg Wettin
Wettin Castle is the ancestral seat of the House of Wettin located above the town of Wettin on the right bank of the Saale in Germany. The site survives today partly rebuilt and incorporated into later municipal buildings, but historically was a fortified hilltop residence of the dynasty.
First raised
900
Its prime
1100
Today
Partial ruin
As it stood in 1100
What Wettin Castle looked like in its prime.
A long, continuous roofed range of pale plastered walls sits directly above a rubble-stone curtain wall and battered stone base on a steep town-facing slope. The roof is steep and covered in red clay tiles; a tall, squared tower with small, regularly spaced square windows and ornamental stepped gables projects above the eastern end. The stone lower wall shows large vertical buttresses and irregular masonry; the whole complex crowns a shallow hill above clustered red-roofed houses.
Its story
The story of Wettin Castle.
The Counts of Wettin and Their Descendant Dynasties, Tenth Century Onward
A Slavic hill fort may have stood on the site before German settlement of the area; the community below it was first recorded in a charter of Otto the Great on 29 July 961, as Vitin civitas, an estate owing tithes to the monastery of St Maurice in Magdeburg. The Wettin burgward lay within the territory of Margrave Rikdag, whose kinsman Dedo was enfeoffed with the county of Wettin during the tenth century.
The Altzeller Annals name a Count Dietrich at Wettin; after his murder in 1034 the county passed to his son Thimo, whom at least one source credits with building the castle itself — a family legend tracing the line further back to one Wettekind cannot be attested in any history. Thimo's own son, Konrad, called 'the Great' and an important figure in Saxon affairs, took up residence at the castle from 1091. From this line of counts descended rulers across German and European states, among them the margraves of Meissen, the landgraves of Thuringia, the dukes, electors and later kings of Saxony, and the Ernestine duchies, with the family at times also holding the crowns of Poland, Great Britain, Bulgaria and Portugal; in Belgium, the cadet line of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha still provides the royal house.
Burgraves, the Counts of Brehna and the Templars, 1123–1288
In 1123 Konrad installed ministeriales of the Schochwitz family as burgraves; they were displaced once Konrad's son Heinrich took up residence at the castle from 1156, and it was in this period that the Oberburg, the upper castle, was built as a separate burgraves' seat, leaving two castles on the same rock, each with its own outer bailey. The Wettin comital line died out in 1217, and the county passed to the counts of Brehna, kinsmen who also bore the Wettin name; Otto IV of Brehna sold the county of Wettin to the Archbishop of Magdeburg on 14 November 1288, and it became an archiepiscopal bailiwick.
The counts of Brehna patronised the Knights Templar. Count Friedrich II, himself a Templar, was killed at Acre on 16 October 1221; his son Dietrich gave the village of Mücheln to the order around 1240.
Fragmented Fiefs and Rebuilding, c.1300–1860
From about 1300 the Oberburg and Unterburg were divided among several feudal holdings, chiefly the Schraplau and Trotha fiefs of the Oberburg; the Trotha family held both by 1440, and the Schraplau fief passed to Brandenburg in 1592. A town fire in 1660 burned the Oberburg; its keep already stood ruinous by 1640 and was demolished entirely in 1697. The Unterburg passed between the Ammendorf and Winckel families until the Winckels held it whole from 1555 and rebuilt it extensively around 1600.
In 1803 Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia bought the whole Wettin property and had its Unterburg palace extended for residential use until 1806; after his death it was used only for commercial purposes, with tenants running a brewery and distillery in its buildings. The north gatehouse was demolished between 1806 and 1813, the upper floors of two wings were taken down around 1830, and the long-ruined Oberburg keep was finally removed in 1860.
From Party School to Grammar School, 1930–2018
After 1930 the gatehouse area of the Unterburg was substantially altered for use as a regional training school of the Nazi Party. In the early 1950s a finance and economics college for farmers moved into the Unterburg; the Oberburg then housed the Schäferschule Wettin, described as the only specialist vocational school for shepherds in central Europe, from 1955 until its closure in 1991. A technical college for plant protection relocated part of its programme to Wettin in 1963 and was reorganised in 1968–69 as an engineering school for agrochemistry and plant protection.
Ownership passed to the Saalkreis district in 1990, and in 1991 the Burg-Gymnasium Wettin opened on the site, a grammar school whose art department, unique in central Germany, has an attached boarding house for its art-class students. Excavations by Paul Grimm in the 1930s found stone walling attesting a tenth-century fortification, overlaid by a two-metre-thick ring wall dated to around 1100; further excavations begun in November 2018, during the school's expansion, added new evidence of the site's building history. Wettin Castle is listed as an architectural heritage monument.
Step inside
5 places to explore in 1100.
The record describes 5 distinct spots at Wettin Castle, including the full exterior approach. Create your own photoreal reconstruction and explore every one, more scenes means more rooms, more angles, and more of the place to stand in.
Build Your Own Castle
Recreate Wettin Castle with AI to explore it.
The artist rebuilds it as it stood in 1100, a photoreal reconstruction that belongs to you alone. Pay with coins, no subscription needed.
Recreate this castle →Defend this castle →Whose castle
Clans who held Wettin Castle.
The families that held Wettin Castle for a decade or more across its history, follow a name to its clan.
Wettin
Ancestral seat of the House of Wettin, whose forebears received the county of Wettin on the Saale in 982.
