Schloss Thürn, Wolfsberg

Schloss Thürn stands on the eastern slope of the Saualpe hills, west of Siegelsdorf in the Wolfsberg district of Carinthia. It began as an outpost for the nearby Reisberg castle and has a fourteenth-century tower at its core. The building was enlarged in the sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries, so its present shape mixes medieval, Renaissance and later styles. The castle’s owners read like a roll-call of Carinthian history. In 1243 it belonged to Wülfling von dem Thurn, then passed through the Lonsperger, Fuchs, Reisberg and Eibiswald families before becoming an estate of the Salzburg archbishop in 1675. The Jesuits held it from 1859 to 1916, and after several changes of hands it was bought by the Hollinger family, then restored by Hellmut Longin in the early 2000s. Visitors enter beneath the former drawbridge gate and see the two-storey main hall braced by two buttresses. On the east side a Gothic oriel window, supported by carved corbels and bearing the Reisberg coat of arms, projects from the wall. A square tower of the fourteenth century rises nearby, topped by a small onion dome. Inside, an arcade links the main building to the east wing, and a stone stairway displays the 1578 double escutcheon of the Eibiswald and Pain families. Remains of a medieval chapel survive above the gateway, with fragments of fifteenth-century frescoes showing saints Rupert, Christopher, Florian and a bishop.