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Festung Königstein – history and legends

Festung Königstein sits on a table mountain some 240 metres above the Elbe, just a few kilometres from the Bielatal. The plateau covers 9.5 hectares and the walls are up to 42 metres high – making it one of the largest mountain fortresses in Europe. Over the centuries it has been a royal castle, a monastery, a fortress and a state prison, and it was never once taken in battle.

Visiting today

Up on the 9.5-hectare rock plateau you'll find more than 50 historic buildings and a circular path along the fortress wall with sweeping views over the Elbe valley. Since 2015 the permanent exhibition “In lapide regis” has told 800 years of history across 33 rooms. In the Brunnenhaus you can peer down the 152.5-metre-deep well, which was driven into the rock between 1566 and 1569. Then there's the Georgenburg, once a dreaded state prison, and the replica of the Giant Barrel.

For children the fortress is history they can touch: at media stations, models and objects they can try things out for themselves, put on knights' helmets and handle virtual weapons. The audio guide tells short stories from everyday life at the fortress. Outside, “Bastion Brixx” is a play area with building blocks, and during the school holidays there are hands-on activities such as dressing up and craft sessions.

Beginnings (Bronze Age to 1241)

Fragments of pottery show that people were already coming up to the table mountain in the Late Bronze Age (around 1000 BC). From the end of the 11th century a hilltop castle stood in the north-west of the plateau. In 1233 a charter of King Wenceslas I of Bohemia names a “Burggraf Gebhard vom Stein” – Burgrave Gebhard of the Rock – as a witness. The name itself first appears in 1241, in the Upper Lusatian border charter that King Wenceslas I sealed “in lapide regis” – “on the king's rock” – in other words, on the Königstein. At that time the castle was Bohemian.

Emperor Charles IV (1359)

From 5 to 19 August 1359 Emperor Charles IV stayed on the Königstein, where he signed shipping privileges for the Elbe. After that the castle was also known as the “Kaiserburg”, the Emperor's Castle.

Passing to Saxony (1408 and 1459)

During the Dohna Feud (1385–1408) the Margrave of Meissen (William the One-Eyed) captured the castle; in 1408 it passed to the Margraviate of Meissen and thus to the House of Wettin. The Königstein finally became Saxon for good with the Treaty of Eger of 25 April 1459, which fixed the border between Saxony and Bohemia – a border that essentially still stands today.

Monastery and St George's Chapel (around 1500–1524)

Around 1500 Duke George the Bearded extended the castle with a south wing and a stair tower; in 1515 St George's Chapel was built on the site of the Romanesque castle chapel (the remains of that chapel from around 1200 are the oldest structure on the fortress). In 1516 George founded a Celestine monastery (the “Monastery of the Praise of the Miracles of Mary”) with twelve monks. It was dissolved again after the Reformation – in 1524 according to Wikipedia, in 1542 according to the fortress chronicle.

The well (1563–1569)

In 1563 Elector Augustus had a well driven into the rock; the work, under the Freiberg master miner Martin Planer (Wikipedia names Conrad König), went on until 1569. The well is 152.5 m deep – the second-deepest historic well in Germany after the one at the Reichsburg Kyffhausen. Every day, besides the rock, eight cubic metres of water had to be hauled out of the shaft. In the 18th century it was called the Augustusbrunnen. It was restored in 1997: 160,000 litres of water were pumped out, and for the first time since 1569 people stood on its floor again. Today the drawing of water is demonstrated in the Brunnenhaus.

Expansion into a fortress under Christian I (1589–1594)

In 1589 Elector Christian I ordered the castle to be built up into the strongest fortress in Saxony (the town of Königstein dates the order to 1587); the master of ordnance Paul Buchner directed the works. By 1594 they had produced the gatehouse with its three-winged façade above the new approach road (1589–1591), the Streichwehr – a flanking defence work for the gate with five casemates (1591), two pleasure houses – the Christiansburg, today the Friedrichsburg, and a pavilion on the Königsnase – and the Old Arsenal (1594). The Gardehaus (today the Old Barracks) followed in 1598, and in 1605 the old castle in the north was rebuilt. The rampart walk is 1,800 m long and the walls are up to 42 m high. Most of the buildings you can see today date from between 1589 and 1631.

Georgenburg, Magdalenenburg, Johannissaal (1619–1631)

Under Elector John George I the Johann-Georgenburg was inaugurated in 1619 (the Elector's residence, today the Georgenburg). In 1622 the Magdalenenburg was built as a free-standing pleasure palace – at once a “princely lodging” and a provisions store; in 1631 came the Johannissaal, a banqueting hall (converted into the New Arsenal in 1816). In 1610 the fortress commander Wolf Friedrich Beon was executed for embezzlement and unauthorised felling of timber.

Baroque (1639–1737)

In 1639, during the Thirty Years' War, Swedish troops marched past the fortress and burned the town of Königstein to the ground – the fortress itself remained unconquered. In 1667–1669 Wolf Caspar von Klengel built the Johann-Georgen-Bastion in front of the Georgenburg, and in 1671–1676 he remodelled the garrison church (St George's Chapel); it was consecrated in 1676 in the presence of Elector John George II. Tsar Peter the Great visited the fortress in 1698 and 1712. In 1729–1735 the fortress entrance was lowered and given two outworks; in 1737 the engineer-architect Jean de Bodt, under Elector Frederick Augustus II, brought the building work to a provisional close (barracks, powder magazines, a bomb-proof well house).

The Giant Barrel (1722–1725)

At the wish of Augustus the Strong, coopers built the Königstein Giant Barrel in the cellar of the Magdalenenburg in 1722–1725. According to Wikipedia it held 249,838 litres, according to the fortress chronicle 238,600 litres, and it cost 8,230 thalers, 18 groschen and 9 pfennigs. It was only ever filled to the brim once – with local wine from the Meissen area – and was regarded as the largest wine barrel in Europe ever actually filled right to the top. In 1818/1819 it had to be removed because it had fallen into disrepair.

Seven Years' War (1756)

In 1756, at the start of the Seven Years' War, the Saxon army surrendered to the Prussians without a fight at the foot of the Lilienstein; Elector Frederick Augustus II had to watch it all from the fortress. He had withdrawn to the Königstein with his court, and the fortress was afterwards declared neutral. Its commander since 1753 had been Lieutenant General Michael Lorenz von Pirch. In 1756 the art treasures of Dresden were stored here for safekeeping.

Napoleon and the 19th century (1806–1895)

In 1806 Saxony became a kingdom and joined Napoleon's Confederation of the Rhine; the Königstein became a federal fortress. In 1813 Napoleon inspected the fortress; in August 1813 the skirmish at Krietzschwitz, right outside its gates, helped pave the way for the Battle of Kulm and the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig. The Dresden art treasures were stored here in 1813 as well. In 1815 the Königstein, as the only remaining Saxon fortress, was strengthened. In 1848 the chimney sweep Sebastian Abratzky climbed barefoot up a cleft in the rock into the fortress – the only known “conquest”; he was arrested. The Schatzhaus, or treasure house, was built in 1854/55. In 1866 the last cannon shot was fired from the fortress at a Prussian patrol, after which a Prussian garrison moved in. In 1870/71 French prisoners of war built the battery ramparts; after the fortress was incorporated into the German Empire's system of fortifications in 1871, eight gun emplacements were added by 1895 – the last major building works.

State prison and famous prisoners (1588–1922)

From 1588 (Martin Mirus) until 3 June 1922 the fortress was Saxony's best-known state prison, holding more than 1,000 prisoners. Well-known inmates included Chancellor Nikolaus Krell (1591–1601), Grand Chancellor Wolf Dietrich von Beichlingen (1703–1709), Johann Friedrich Böttger, co-inventor of European porcelain (three months in 1702, and again in 1706/07 on the orders of Augustus the Strong), the Leipzig mayor Franz Conrad Romanus (1705–1746, more than 40 years), the Livonian statesman Johann Reinhold von Patkul (1706/07), the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1849/50, after the Dresden May Uprising), the Social Democrat August Bebel (1872–1874, or three weeks in 1874), the writer Frank Wedekind (1899/1900) and the caricaturist Thomas Theodor Heine (1899). The last state prisoner was held here in 1922 for ten days – for fighting a duel.

The World Wars and General Giraud's escape (1913–1945)

In 1913 the Reichstag abolished the post of commander – the end of the Königstein's status as a fortress. From 1914 to 1918 it served as a prisoner-of-war camp for Russian and French officers; in 1920, under the Treaty of Versailles, it was largely disarmed, and in 1921 it became a convalescent hospital for the Reichswehr. From 1939 to 1945 it was Oflag IV-B, a camp for Polish, French, British, Dutch and American officers and generals. In 1942 the French general Henri Giraud managed to escape from the fortress to Switzerland – the only French general to escape from an officers' camp. Other prisoners included Generals René Prioux, Gustave Mesny (murdered by the SS in 1945), Henri Winkelman (Netherlands), Franciszek Kleeberg (Poland) and Tadeusz Komorowski, who had ordered the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. From January 1943 Dresden's art treasures were stored in the casemates. In 1945 the garrison handed command over to the French prisoners, and the Red Army set up a military hospital.

GDR era and museum (1949–1990)

From 1949 to 1955 the fortress was used as a “Jugendwerkhof”, a youth reformatory where young offenders or politically suspect teenagers were to be “re-educated”. On 29 May 1955 the GDR Ministry of Culture took over the site and opened it as an open-air museum of military history; by 1957 exhibitions were on show in five buildings, among them the medieval stone-firing cannon known as the “Faule Magd” – the “Lazy Maid”. In the 1960s the wartime powder magazine of 1889/91 was converted into a civil-defence bunker (the Saalkasematte). In 1967–1970 a lift for 42 people with two intermediate stops was built, capable of carrying vehicles of up to 4.5 tonnes.

Legend The Page's Bed

Behind the Friedrichsburg there is a narrow ledge of wall jutting out over the abyss, known as the “Pagenbett” – the Page's Bed. On 12 August 1675, so the story goes, Karl Heinrich von Grunau, personal page to Elector John George II, climbed out through an embrasure after a drinking bout, lay down on the ledge and fell fast asleep. In the morning he was carefully tied down with ropes, and then, on the Elector's orders, woken with drums and trumpets. His luck held: later on, his shying horse leapt with him from the Dresden Elbe bridge into the river – he survived that too, and did not die until 1744, at the age of 106.

Legend

More of a comic tale than a legend: The Elector and the King of Prussia were sitting over their wine on the Königstein, and because the King liked the fortress so much, the Elector simply made him a present of the Lilienstein opposite. When the King then wanted to build a fortress of his own over there, the Elector regretted his gift and sent his commander Kyau to Berlin to ask for it back. The King laughed and let it go – and so the Lilienstein stayed Saxon.

Legend The ghosts of the fortress

They say the Königstein is not quite a safe place at night. By the memorial stone on the Königsnase, where the alchemist Baron von Klettenberg was beheaded in 1720, people claim to have seen him walking about in old-fashioned dress. And anyone who comes up the Luisenweg at midnight will see, in front of the fortress, an enormously tall man in a dark cloak and slouch hat, who walks round the church and vanishes the moment you call out to him. It was even said in the old days that in barrack room no. 10 the soldiers were thrown out of their beds every year on 9 September – though when someone once kept watch, nothing at all happened.

Legend God's Thaler

In 1683 the little town of Königstein below the fortress burned almost completely to the ground. A poor widow with three children lost everything. The next day, as she was fetching water from a spring in the rocks, something clinked into her jug: a thaler bearing the inscription “Gott giebt, Gott nimmt!” – “God gives, God takes!”. The sign gave her fresh courage; she moved to Dresden with her children and made a living there.

Links to other places

As a Bohemian royal castle, the Königstein kept watch over the Elbe, just like Tetschen and the Schreckenstein further upstream. In 1426 the bailiff of the Königstein captured the rock castle of Neurathen for Saxony, and during the Dohna Feud the Burgrave of Dohna fled by way of the Königstein. Johann Friedrich Böttger was held prisoner here in 1706 and 1707 before going on to invent porcelain in Meissen, and Augustus the Strong's giant wine barrel was designed by Pöppelmann, the architect of the Zwinger.

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