Kyburg Castle

A fortification was probably raised above the Töss in the second half of the 10th century by the counts of Winterthur; Liutfried II is the presumed builder. It appears in writing in 1027 as Chuigeburg, the cows' fort, a name pointing to an origin as a refuge for livestock.

The castle probably sheltered Count Werner of Winterthur in 1025, when he joined Duke Ernst of Swabia in revolt against Ernst's stepfather, the emperor Conrad II; after the rising was put down, both men fled here. Conrad took and destroyed the place, an event dated 1027 by some accounts and 1028 or 1030 by others, and Werner fell on 17 August 1030 at Burg Falkenstein. Rebuilt, it passed by the marriage of Adelheid of Winterthur-Kyburg to Count Hartmann I of Dillingen, and in 1079, with Hartmann fighting for the papal party in the Investiture Controversy, it was attacked and partly destroyed by Ulrich II, the emperor's abbot of St Gallen.

The county of Kyburg was formed in 1053 as a Dillingen possession, and by 1096 the counts of Dillingen carried a count of Kyburg among their titles; Hartmann's grandson took the style Hartmann I of Kyburg and married Richenza of Lenzburg-Baden. By 1180 the Kyburgs stood as a cadet line in their own right. The extinction of the Lenzburgs in 1173 and of the Zähringer in 1218 brought both inheritances to them, and by the 13th century they ranked with the Habsburgs and the house of Savoy among the great powers between Rhine and Alps.

The Kyburg line died out in the 1260s, and the inheritance passed through Anna of Kyburg to the counts of Habsburg-Laufenburg, who sold the greater part of it to Rudolf of Habsburg.

After Rudolf's election as German king the castle rapidly lost importance, though the imperial regalia of the Holy Roman Empire were kept here from 1273 into the 1320s, with one interruption. A remnant of the Kyburg lands was gathered under Habsburg administration as a county governed from the castle. After a great fire, dated somewhere between 1250 and 1370, extensive renewal work followed.

In 1349, 330 Jews were burned within the fortress. It was one of the deadliest pogroms in the Swiss lands.

In 1424 the city of Zürich bought the county and the castle became the seat of its reeve. The first of them, Johannes Schwend the Elder, had the dilapidated buildings put back in order, and the upper bergfried was raised anew in tuff with an entrance eleven metres above the ground. Austria demanded the county back in 1442 as compensation for its support in the Old Zürich War; Zürich raised 17,000 gulden in 1452 and held it in pledge, and in 1499 King Maximilian I gave up his rights to it.

Fifty-nine reeves resided at Kyburg before the Helvetic Republic ended the office in 1798, patrician Zürchers serving six-year terms, holding court and collecting dues; the post often served as a step towards the mayoralty of Zürich, as for Johann Heinrich Waser and Heinrich Escher. The chapel was painted for the first Zürich reeves in 1440, and Felix Schwarzmurer endowed a cycle on the life of Zürich's city saint Regula around 1480; at the Reformation the reeve Hans Rudolf Lavater had the paintings plastered over, after which the chapel served as a gun magazine, and in 1624 it was divided into two storeys. In March 1798 peasants occupied and plundered the castle, granting the last reeve, Hans Caspar Ulrich, free withdrawal.

The castle served again as an administrative seat, which held off the decay of the buildings, until the cantonal reorganisation of 1831 left it without a function. The canton then auctioned it for 10,600 francs to Franz Heinrich Hirzel, a Winterthur coffee-house keeper who meant to pull it down and sell the stone. History-minded citizens of Winterthur blocked the scheme, and so he sold it on in 1835 to Alexander Sobansky, a Polish count who had fought in the 1830 rising against Russia and fled after its defeat; he lived here for close to thirty years.

Matthäus Pfau opened the castle as a museum in 1865 and had the chapel's buried frescoes uncovered; in 1876 he bought an iron maiden from a castle in Carinthia and set it up to draw visitors, though its materials are not medieval. Eduard Bodmer, the last private owner, restored the buildings with Rudolf Rahn's help and guided visitors himself. The canton of Zurich bought the castle back from his heirs in 1917 for 150,000 francs; it is rated a class A Swiss cultural property of national significance, and the Verein Museum Schloss Kyburg has run the museum since 1999.