Qualla: Glücksburg Castle

Glücksburg Castle: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jorges, CC BY-SA 3.0. The building contract was signed on 21 December 1582, and the sum in it was 6,000 Lübeck marks - at the time roughly the price of 1,200 cattle. For that, the master builder Nikolaus Karies agreed to pull down a Cistercian abbey and put up a castle out of its stones. Then the water came. The Schwennau and the Munkbrarupau were dammed, the abbey grounds vanished under a new pond, and Glücksburg was left standing on a granite plinth with water on every side, a white cube of plastered brick with an octagonal tower at each corner. Germany's northernmost castle, its exterior barely changed in four centuries.

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Image: Jorges | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glücksburg Castle: The Abbey Under the Pond

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Wikitour assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before the castle there was Rude Abbey. Monks displaced from a dissolved double monastery at Schleswig settled first at Guldholm on the Langsee, then between 1209 and 1210 founded a Cistercian house here, beside an older motte-and-bailey castle whose remains still survive. T...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Wikitour assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glücksburg Castle: God Grant Luck With Peace

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dinkum, CC BY-SA 3.0. The man who ordered all this was Duke John, known to everyone as Hans the Younger, brother of King Frederick II of Denmark. The estates refused him homage, leaving him a duke without much of a duchy, so he built and traded instead - a successful early mercantilist who scattered c...

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Image: Dinkum | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glücksburg Castle: The Cradle of Europe

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Hans died in 1622 and his son Philipp took Glücksburg, founding the elder ducal line. It ran over 150 years and produced no history to speak of - a family seat with a household of around eighty, not a court. The line died out in 1779, the fief reverted to the Danish crown, and th...

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Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Glücksburg Castle: Red Hall, Green Hall, Crypt

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolfgang Pehlemann, CC BY-SA 3.0. You enter across a bridge into the basement, and the first room is the vestibule called the Green Hall - sparely furnished, but floored in Öland limestone in which fossils show through the tread of four hundred years. The chapel is the strangest room in the building - the only on...

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Image: Wolfgang Pehlemann | CC BY-SA 3.0

Glücksburg Castle: May 1945

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. War reached Glücksburg twice. In 1864, during the Second Schleswig War, it quartered Prince Charles of Prussia and then served as hospital and barracks; the personal union between the Danish crown and the duchies ended, and the castle passed into Prussian hands until Wilhelm I re...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0