Schloss Ebersdorf

Schloss Ebersdorf stands in the small town of Saalburg-Ebersdorf in south-eastern Thüringen. It is a former residence with a park, built as an irregular four-wing complex of more than 120 rooms around a 1,300-square-metre courtyard. The Reuß-Ebersdorf line of counts made it their home from 1690 until 1848. Before the present building there had been a knight’s estate bought by the lords of Gera before 1425. After several changes of owner the estate passed in 1670 to the younger line of Reuß. The palace is worth visiting for its layered history and the people who shaped it. Heinrich X. Reuß-Ebersdorf demolished the old water castle in 1692 and erected the first Baroque block on plans by the builder Reinel, though a fire in 1696 soon damaged the new residence. His wife later added a chapel for her pietist household. Their son Heinrich XXIX. invited the Moravian leader Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, who married Heinrich’s sister in the castle church in 1722. The same year Zinzendorf founded the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine, whose members soon served at the court and later ran an orphanage on the site. In 1756 Heinrich XXIV. granted the Brüdergemeine freedom to practise trades, which brought economic growth to Ebersdorf. Visitors find a broad classical west wing added between 1788 and 1792 by Christian Friedrich Schuricht. Its garden front presents a six-bay temple façade with giant columns and a recessed pediment. Inside are a large ground-floor garden hall and an oval first-floor dining room, both kept in classical style. The former main Baroque banqueting hall on the second floor, once turned into a church and later a library, still carries elaborate stucco work. The palace park was enlarged after 1802, and in 1806 Napoleon spent two nights here with thirty-two generals during his campaign against Prussia.