Hi there! I watched a series today that was so bad it made be write the first blog post in one and a half years. Will I write more again in the future? I don't know, I guess we'll see. In the meantime, follow all my latest castle adventures over on Instagram . See you there! Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the immortal Sisi, has inspired the imagination of the people for more than a century now. Her life, her love, her tragedies, her death. Adored, free spirited and one of the original royal IT girls. A face that could launch a thousands ships, well, bring peace to two feuding nations by simply being her charming self. A woman that, 120 years after her death, can still draw crowds and be the foundation stone of what seems like half the tourist industry of several regions. (Okay, that might have been slightly exaggerated but have you ever been to Vienna and seen the souvenir shops?) So it's not too surprising that time and time again, cinema and TV productions have tried to ca...
Schloss Sanssouci is perhaps the best known of all Prussian palaces, it is not part of the current restitution claims The Hohenzollern, the heirs of the German Kaiser and King of Prussia, have made more headlines over the past couple of months than usual. Why? They have filed different lawsuit to reclaim former properties. One of the court cases, about Schloss Rheinfels in St. Goar along the most scenic part of the Rhine river in Western Germany, has been dismissed this summer . For a couple of years now and behind closed doors, there have also been negotiations between the Prussian branch of the Hohenzollern family, the federal government of Germany and the states of Berlin and Brandenburg in Eastern Germany concerning the restitution of tens of thousands of art objects, unpaid housing rights at Schloss Cecilienhof or two other residences in Potsdam, and compensation payments for expropriations following the Second World War. Due to the demands of the family that were de...
It's the second week of January and this Castleholic has managed to achieve something she never has before: I have written about all the castles and palaces I visited during the previous year. Procrastinator no more! (I wish...) That kind of brings us to a problem though about the future upkeep of this space on the world wide web though that is the matter for another post... First, let's learn more about the history of the place that served as the residence of the electors and later kings of Saxony for centuries, shall we? We shall. While the future Residenzschloss was firstly mentioned in the 13th century, the expansion of the castle into a princely residence started around the year 1400 under Margrave Wilhelm I of Meissen, known as 'the One-Eyed'. During the mid to late 15th century, the structure was further extended according to the plans of master builder Arnold von Westfalen and turned into an enclosed four-wing castle. The Saxon rulers continued to enhan...