Top 20 Castles around Himmelkron

An impressive building. Napoleon is said to have cursed it. He apparently saw a ghost in the night.

The magnificent complex is characterized by the redesign that Margrave Georg Friedrich had carried out by the architect Caspar Vischer after the destruction in the Second Margrave War in 1557. The wings of the narrow castle, which had been founded by the Counts of Andechs before 1135, were transformed into an impressive four-wing complex and secured against the mountain side with enormous bastions. Today, the Plassenburg, high above Kulmbach, is a cultural center of the Upper Mainland. After the fortifications were destroyed at the behest of Napoleon in 1806, the castle served as a prison and workhouse until 1928 - then exhibition rooms, museums and display collections were set up.

In the "Schöner Hof" with its richly decorated arcades, the atmosphere of a German princely court of the Renaissance comes to life.

"Ce maudit château!" - "This cursed castle!" is what Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have said in horror after he spent the night of May 15-16, 1812 in the New Palace. The ghost of the "White Lady of Himmelkron" had appeared to him there. It is also possible that the castellan had played a joke on the Emperor of the French. Relevant items such as chains, rattles and a white robe were later found in his estate.

For around six centuries it has been one of the festival city's landmarks: the Old Palace with its courtyard in the historic city center of Bayreuth on Maximilianstrasse. Until the middle of the 18th century it served as the residence of the Margraves of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Today the building is the seat of the tax office.

A fire destroyed the residence in January 1753,[1] whereupon on behalf of Frederick III. (Margrave 1735–1763) and his wife Wilhelmine built the New Palace with an attached courtyard garden on Ludwigstrasse.[2] Apparently the Margrave had forgotten to put out a candle when he left a painting cabinet after 8 p.m. The fire spread in no time; Since only primitive syringes were available and the extinguishing water froze quickly, he finally brought in artillery and created a breach between the area of the castle that was on fire and the still intact western part. That night, the older castle area with tower and chapel, which formed a closed square, was destroyed by flames. The former main hall, which had been used for musical theater, opera and ballet since the early 17th century, as well as the ceiling painting there by Johann Oswald Harms, were also lost. The template for this ceiling painting, signed “1684” by Harms, is in the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig.[15][16] While Friedrich lost almost all of his personal belongings, Wilhelmine was able to have most of her most valuable furniture, books, sheet music and instruments brought to safety.

The “Italian Building” was built after 1759 for the Margrave's second wife, Sophie Caroline Marie of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, as a stand-alone building south of the castle and only later structurally connected to the New Palace through a connecting wing. The architect was Rudolf Heinrich Richter, who, unlike Saint-Pierre, allowed the formal splendor of the interior decoration created by Giovanni Battista Pedrozzi to spill over onto the outer walls. The young Carl von Gontard succeeded in uniting the two fundamentally different buildings using a discreetly projecting connecting link with a round balcony.[1] At the beginning of the 1990s, the facades of the Italian building were renovated and its courtyard area was redesigned To the north of the main building, across Glasenappweg, is the former kitchen building, a single, two-story house with a hipped roof. From 1867 to 1908 the secondary school for girls was housed there,[4] later the municipal auxiliary school. When it was founded on October 1, 1920, the municipal commercial school moved into the building that the Bavarian Crown Estate Administration had given it. Although the location was only approved as a temporary arrangement, the business school remained until 1938.[5] Today a shopping arcade leads through the building to Richard-Wagner-Straße. Source: Wikipedia

A very beautiful old castle.