Branik Castle

The hill above the village of Branik, on the crossing ground between the Vipava Valley and the Komen Karst, carried fortified settlements from prehistoric times and a Roman castrum. The founding date is unclear. The castle is first named in the records in 1230, though its building is put at the end of the 12th century and credited to the knight Ulrik I of Rihemberk, a Gorizian ministerialis out of Tyrol, whose family is attested from 1118 in an Oton de Rifenberch.

The name comes from the family's former castle at Riffenstein in Tyrol, and compounds the German Riffe, ridge, and Berg, mountain. They held substantial fiefs from the Counts of Gorizia in the Vipava Valley, on the Karst Plateau and around the town of Gorizia. Ulrik I swore to the alliance Patriarch Bertold and Count Meinhard I concluded in 1238 against Koper, and a charter of 1249 records him and Vošalk II of Duino agreeing to marry their children to one another.

Konrad I and Volker of Rihemberk were among those empowered on the Gorizian side to conclude a truce in the war of 1267-69 against the patriarch. In 1348 Ulrik IV helped the people of Koper in their revolt against Venice, and the Venetians demanded the death penalty for him.

Ulrik V went the other way. In 1356 he contracted to serve Venice with sixty armoured horsemen in Istria, on the Karst or in Friuli, and the peace treaty of 18 February 1358 between the Hungarian king and Venice names him a Venetian ally. He acted almost independently, hiring himself out as a condottiere to Gorizians, Habsburgs and Venetians alike.

In 1365 he handed his Gorizian fiefs, Rihemberk, Dornberk and Carinthian Bajdek, to Duke Rudolf IV of Austria and took them back from him in fief. He lost them in the war that followed; in 1366 the Gorizians granted them to his sons and his cousin Hugo II, and Ulrik later made peace with Meinhard of Gorizia, who returned his holdings. In 1371 he was marchio of the Aquileian possessions in Istria, and he died in 1372 without male heirs, the ancestral castle passing with the other chief Gorizian fiefs to other heirs.

When Count Meinhard VII of Gorizia died in 1385, his daughter Katarina, married to the Bavarian duke John Wittelsbach, claimed a third of the inheritance, and the division of the next year gave the couple the castle and lordship of Rihemberk; the Gorizian counts bought it back in 1393. When the Gorizian line died out in 1500 the castle passed to the Habsburgs. The Venetians occupied it briefly in 1508, after which it went in fief to Janez von Neuhaus.

The Lanthieri connection is dated two ways: the house is said to have acquired castle and lands in 1528, and also to have taken Rihemberk first in pledge from Archduke Ferdinand in 1629, with Baron Gašper Lanthieri buying it in 1646. Either way the family held it until the end of the Second World War. They added a residential palacio in 1649, and the castle took its present shape in the 17th and 18th centuries as a Baroque residence around the 13th-century round keep, within Renaissance walls and corner turrets, the romantic crenellations coming with the 19th-century remodelling.

Rihemberk was, with Gorizia, one of the strongest centres of the new faith in the area during the Protestant years, influential Protestant families being recorded there from 1560 to 1595. A strong peasant revolt flared at the castle in 1713, at the time of the Tolmin rebellion. The national awakening reached the place after 1848, with a reading room founded and Simon Gregorčič staying there and dedicating his poem Slovo od Rihemberka to the place. During the First World War an Austrian emergency hospital was fitted out in the castle.

The Partisans burned and dynamited the castle in 1944, and all of its furnishings were destroyed. The Allied Military Government began repair work after the war; the castle was nationalised in 1945, and the first restoration works came in the 1960s. It stood in state ownership between 1990 and 2005 and decayed further in those years.

Declared a cultural monument of national importance on 6 October 1999, it was then given by the state to the City Municipality of Nova Gorica, which undertook to restore it and open it to the public by 2023. Restoration has gone on gradually since the 1980s, with the prewar structures not all rebuilt; part of the castle opened to visitors in the summer of 2017, its management leased to the Svitar institute of Tolmin, which runs tours and cultural-historical events there.