Schloss Niederleis

Schloss Niederleis stands in the village of Niederleis in northern Lower Austria. It was once surrounded by a moat and now sits in a park. The oldest written record of the place dates from 1308. The castle’s present buildings come from the 16th century. In the Thirty Years War it was ruined and later rebuilt by the Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz. The abbey’s stonemasons from Kaisersteinbruch supplied worked stone for the interiors. In the 19th century the owners filled the house with Italian furniture, Spanish leather wall-hangings and Flemish tapestries. A late-19th-century owner was a friend of Count Wilczek, the builder of Kreuzenstein Castle. The castle served as the main filming location for the 1968 film Moos auf den Steinen, now seen as the first work of the New Austrian Cinema. The four-winged building encloses a courtyard with two-storey arcades on one side. A stone bridge from 1735 crosses the former moat to a gate-tower. Four statues on the bridge represent saints, possibly carved by Giovanni Giuliani. Inside, the main room is a 19th-century ballroom with a 15th-century Italian chimneypiece. The chapel holds a 14th-century painted cross attributed to Giotto’s school. The park still shows traces of its early-19th-century romantic layout, with Italian spolia in the garden gates and baroque figures reused from the early 18th century.