Aarburg Castle

The year the first castle rose on the steep spur above the Aare narrows is not known. It appears indirectly in a document of 1123, in connection with Count Adalbero I of Frohburg, and a fortification is thought to have stood there from early in the 12th century. The Bürons held it from about the middle of the 12th century, and shortly before 1200 the Frohburgs took it back and installed ministeriales. The first direct mention is from 1255, some fifteen years after a Frohburg partition carried it to the family's Waldenburg branch; the oldest surviving fabric, the main tower known as the Harzer and the palas, dates from about that time. The castle watched the north-south route and the river harbour at the Aarewaage, and blood justice went with it. In 1299 the Frohburgs sold castle and office to the Habsburgs, and from 1330 the von Kriech family, lesser Habsburg service nobility, held both in pledge and lived there.

Bern overran parts of what is now the Aargau in April 1415. How Aarburg changed hands is told two ways: by one account it fell to a brief siege on 20 April; by another its holder, Johannes Kriech, resisted long after the little town below had been taken, and sold the castle to Bern only in 1416, once word reached him that the rest of the Aargau had fallen. His brother-in-law Rudolf von Landenberg pressed a claim in 1446 and was refused. From 1416 the new Bernese office of Aarburg was run by Landvögte, resident in the castle from 1419; at first the bailiff administered the whole Bernese Aargau, and only as Bern pushed back the rights of nobility and clergy were further bailiwicks added, beginning with Lenzburg in 1442 and Schenkenberg in 1460.

The palas was gutted, re-floored and raised in 1470; in 1534-35 its top storey was heightened and the present roof truss built, while the top floor of the main tower came down for a barrel vault and a breastwork, and a tent roof followed in 1557. The works of 1621 to 1627 were for comfort and display, adding a hexagonal stair tower at the south-west corner of the palas.

After the First Villmergen War the Zurich fortress engineer Johann Georg Wertmüller drew up a scheme for a fortress, holding it urgent to fortify the ridge running away eastward, too easily taken; the cost sank the project. Bern's council resolved on the full build-out to an artillery fortress in 1661, the foundations were finished by 1663 and the building itself dragged on ten more years, producing a work more than 400 metres long. Its purpose was to guard the link between the Reformed towns of Bern and Zurich at the narrowest point of Bernese territory and to make an attack by the Catholic neighbours harder.

From 1666 the fortress carried a permanent garrison, with the Landvogt as its commander. Part of it was a prison, used above all for political prisoners; the best known was Jacques-Barthélemy Micheli du Crest, held from 1749 to 1766. On 10 March 1798 the Bernese handed the fortress to the French without a fight, and state prisoners went on being held there through the Helvetic Republic, among them Alois von Reding.

The new canton of Aargau took over in 1804, using the works as arsenal and barracks until 1826 and as a prison after that. The execution ground in the eastern works, between tenaille and hornwork, served under Bernese rule for court hearings and death sentences, and the canton had executions carried out there too, the last in 1863. When the penitentiary at Lenzburg opened in 1864 the rooms here fell empty; the canton let them to people without means and kept up only the barest repairs.

In 1891 the Grosser Rat resolved to set up an "institution for juvenile criminals and scoundrels" in the fortress. The compulsory-education institution that opened in 1893 was the first of its kind in Switzerland. Discipline, order and punishment governed it at first; under Adolf Scheurmann, director from 1905, the inmates were treated as pupils given schooling and a trade apprenticeship, and from the 1930s the educational purpose came further to the fore. A complete rebuild between 1946 and 1959 took in the main tower, the palas and the barracks wings; a second general renewal finished in 1988. Aarburg is classed as a Swiss cultural property of national significance and is described as the only fortress of the early modern period preserved in the country; the Kantonale Jugendheim still occupies it.