🏛️ Schloss Thurnau

Thurnau Castle is a castle and palace complex in Thurnau (district of Kulmbach) in Upper Franconia. It is one of the largest and most important palace complexes in Northern Bavaria with construction phases from the 13th to the 19th century.
The oldest part of the castle is the bower, the "Hus uf dem Stein", from the 13th century. It was built by the Knights of Förtsch. Between 1430 and 1477 the archive building and a residential wing were added. In 1581 Hans Georg von Giech had Hans Schlachter add the prayer bay to the bower and from 1600 to 1606 he built the Hans-Georgen-Bau in Renaissance style.
The changes after earning the dignity of count in 1695 were numerous: Karl Gottfried I von Giech had a representative stuccoed hall set up on the upper floor of the Hans-Georgen-Building and the new church with the splendid mansion gallery was built from 1701 to 1706.
Between 1729 and 1731 the Carl Maximilian Building was added to the Upper Court. Inside is the so-called Schönburg Hall with landscape wallpaper from the end of the 18th century, which Christian Carl Ernst Heinrich von Giech had set up for his wife Caroline von Schönburg-Wechselburg, who came from Saxony.
In 1833 the gatehouse burned down and was rebuilt in neo-Gothic forms by 1837. At the end of the 1830s, under Hermann Giech, an archive room at the lower courtyard and the ancestral hall in the Hans-Georgen-Bau were set up. The tea house in the palace garden was built around 1840. In the 1850s, the transition to the church, which until then had been a simple wooden corridor, was also decorated in a neo-Gothic style and provided with larger windows.

For me, the Thurnau market square is one of the most beautiful I know in the region, the great castle and palace complex with a wooden bridge to the St. Laurentius church.

Thurnau Castle is a castle and palace complex located in Thurnau (Kulmbach district) in Upper Franconia. It is one of the largest and most important palace complexes in Franconia, with construction phases dating from the 13th to the 19th century.