Riegersburg Castle
Riegersburg
Interesting facts
- The 17th-century field marshal Raimondo Montecuccoli is said to have called Riegersburg the strongest fortress in Christendom.
- Around ten hectares of vineyards grow inside the castle walls, a tradition dating back to the time of its 17th-century mistress, the Gallerin.
- Around 1420 the Walsee lords had a 120-metre path, known as the Donkey Climb, cut into the west face of the rock to give the upper castle its own access.
- The Gallerin married three times: she paid her first husband 15,000 guilders to stay out of co-ownership, lost the second at the Battle of Mogersdorf and divorced the third.
- In a dispute over church patronage, the Gallerin once delivered a sermon herself in the parish church of Paldau.
- Her baroque White Hall, a summer dining room by Antonio Solari finished in 1658, bears her rhyming inscription admitting that building was a pleasure she knew to be costly.
- The castle rock is the remnant of a volcanic vent formed more than two million years ago by explosions of magma meeting water.
- Its earliest known mention, from 1138, names it 'Ruotkerspurch', the castle of a man called Rüdiger.
- After the Purgstall line died out in 1817 the estate was divided among 17 heirs, who sold it at public auction in 1822 to Prince Johann of Liechtenstein.
- An engraving on a window in the Knights' Hall commemorates a drinking bout said to have lasted twenty days under the Ursenbeck family.
Why it is worth it
Riegersburg Castle crowns a sheer outcrop of basalt in the hills of southeastern Styria, the neck of an extinct volcano that rises abruptly above the surrounding farmland to about 482 metres above sea level. The castle is built from the dark rock of the hill itself, so that walls and cliff merge into a single mass, visible from far across the countryside.
The first knight recorded here, Rudiger von Hohenberg, appears in 1122. In the later Middle Ages the castle belonged to the Walsee family, who came into conflict with the ruler of Styria in 1415. Its decisive period came in the 17th century under Baroness Katharina Elisabeth von Wechsler, known as the Gallerin, the most important figure in the castle's history. Between 1637 and 1653 she enlarged and fortified it into one of the largest and strongest castles of its time, ringed by about 3 kilometres of walls with five gates and two moats, and containing 108 rooms. The reason was close at hand: the Ottoman frontier at times lay only 20 to 25 km away, and in times of danger the fortress sheltered several thousand people from the surrounding district.
In 1822 Riegersburg was bought by Prince Johann Josef von Liechtenstein, and it still belongs to the princely family of Liechtenstein. At the very end of the Second World War it was taken by Soviet forces on 8 May 1945. Today part of the interior serves as a museum: about 25 of the rooms present the history of the castle and its owners, together with an exhibition on witchcraft and the witch trials of the region. The village of Riegersburg, at the foot of the rock, belongs to the Südoststeiermark district, a region of small towns and farmland southeast of Graz.
Getting there
The castle stands above the village of Riegersburg, about 7 km northeast of Feldbach and roughly 39 km east of Graz. The Lödersdorf stop on the Styrian Eastern Railway lies within the municipality. Graz Airport (GRZ) is about 38 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Riegersburg Castle is a medieval castle standing on an extinct volcano above the town of Riegersburg in the Austrian state of Styria. The castle is owned by the Princely Family of Liechtenstein and contains a museum with changing exhibitions. Riegersburg Castle stands at an elevation of 450 m (1,480 ft).
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