Schloss Grabow

Schloss Grabow stands on a low mound in the village of Grabow, part of the town of Möckern in Sachsen-Anhalt. The site began as a water fortress around 940 and passed from Emperor Otto I to Magdeburg’s St Maurice monastery in 948. The von Wulffen family took control in 1334 and built the round castle with its wide ring moat still visible today. A stone bridge crosses the ditch on the east side, leading up to the main entrance. Inside the northern section of the old curtain wall, fragments of a twelve-metre-high tower and its gatehouse survive from the 12th and 13th centuries. The present two-storey manor house was erected in 1621 for Hans-Christoph von Wulffen and remodelled in 1713. A carved coat of arms above the entrance dates from 1621 and twelve window axes line its plain façade. Around 1900 the roof was raised into a mansard form and a winter garden added, linking the house to the landscaped park. The park itself was created from 1901 by Olof von Lindequist, a royal Prussian forester who also organised imperial hunts in the Letzlinger Heath. Visitors enter through an early-18th-century basket-arched gateway topped by a broken pediment. Inside the courtyard the manor house occupies the south side, its walls framed by pilasters beneath the slate mansard roof. Remains of the medieval ring wall and tower base stand to the north, while the widened moat has become a series of ornamental ponds planted with clipped hedges. The park once stretched across 719 hectares and included memorial stones for the von Lindequist and von Rohr families. After the Second World War the estate was used as a school and local offices before being returned to private ownership in 1997.