Goseck Castle

Goseck Castle is thus one of the border castles on the Saale. The "castrum antiquissimum" was the ancestral castle of the Counts Palatine of Saxony, who, with Frederick I around 1000, are first documented as the Goseck family of counts. Frederick I built a chapel of St. Simeon next to the castle as the burial place of his family. The sons Adalbert, Dedo and Friedrich were not only important for Goseck. Adalbert (1000-1072) attended the cathedral school in Halberstadt and became canon and provost there in 1032. In 1043 he was appointed archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen. Missionaries reached as far as Iceland and Greenland on his behalf. In 1060 he established the dioceses of Ratzeburg and Mecklenburg. Count Palatine Dedo founded a Benedictine monastery on the site of the old castle in 1041. His brother Friedrich II founded a provostry in nearby Sulza. Already in 1183 the sale of monastery goods began, and in 1540 the monastic period ended with secularisation. In 1548 it came into the possession of Georg von Altensee.

Through changing owners and extensive rebuilding in the 16th and 17th centuries, especially by the von Pöllnitz family, the former monastery complex acquired its Renaissance character. In the period from 1840 to 1945 Goseck was owned by the Counts of Zech-Burkersroda. After 1945 the castle was a school and youth hostel. Since 1997 the complex has been owned by the foundation.

Today, the "European Music and Cultural Centre Schloss Goseck", which was founded by Schloss Goseck e.V. in 1998, has its headquarters here. The top-class Goseck Castle Concerts are mainly dedicated to old music and have an aura that reaches far beyond the borders of the Saale-Unstrut region.