Schloss Greillenstein

The Kuefstein family bought Schloss Greillenstein in 1534. They have not left. Four hundred and seventy years of continuous ownership by a single Austrian noble family, through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Napoleonic occupation, two World Wars, and the end of the Austrian Empire. The castle still stands in the Waldviertel region of Lower Austria, near Röhrenbach in the Horn district, and Karl Kuefstein still runs it.

The Castle

Hans Georg III demolished the medieval fortress and built the current Renaissance palace between 1570 and 1590. The dimensions have not changed since. A Baroque renovation around 1700 added the current main entrance in the south tower. The courtyard holds Baroque stone figures and sandstone dwarves, nine of an original forty. A stone dragon remains from an elaborate Renaissance water feature.

The interior preserves what most castles have lost: original furnishings from every century of occupation. A painted wooden ceiling from 1590. A Renaissance bathing complex, one of the only surviving examples in Austria, with separate chambers for hot and cold water. Two libraries holding roughly 7,000 volumes. A 17th-century courtroom, intact.

The Chapel

The castle chapel contains a pulpit from approximately 1600, a statue of St. Anna, and an altar dated 1604. The Kuefstein family held Protestant sympathies through much of the sixteenth century, though they remained loyal to the Habsburg emperor and Hans Ludwig converted to Catholicism in 1627. The chapel’s furnishings reflect this period of religious transition, when Protestant and Catholic iconography overlapped in Austrian noble houses.

Nearby in Röhrenbach stands the Kuefstein family crypt chapel, with a dome fresco by Paul Troger, one of the leading Austrian Baroque painters.

The Ghost Tour

The castle offers evening ghost tours from July through October, once monthly, by candlelight. The route passes through the castle rooms, past ancestor portraits that the tour guides say come alive after dark. The path leads down into the dungeon, continues over the family crypt, enters the secret laboratory of the alchemist Johann Ferdinand II von Kuefstein, and ends in the castle cellar.

Johann Ferdinand II is the most interesting Kuefstein for our purposes. He maintained a private alchemy laboratory in the castle. The details of what he practiced there remain largely undocumented in public sources, but the room survives and is part of the tour. A nobleman with a secret laboratory in a Renaissance castle in the Austrian countryside, experimenting with transmutation or medicine or both: this is the milieu that produced the Rosicrucian movement and the alchemical networks that Mackay documented across the same period and geography.

Visiting

Schloss Greillenstein operates as a museum. The standard tour covers the Renaissance and Baroque interiors, the bathing complex, the courtroom, and the libraries. The ghost tour requires advance registration and is limited in numbers. Good footwear is required. The tour is not recommended for children under eight.

The castle is in the Waldviertel, about 90 minutes northwest of Vienna by car. The nearest town with services is Horn.

Website: schlossgreillenstein.at