Qualla: International Wind- and Watermill Museum

International Wind- and Watermill Museum: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Franzfoto, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a walk along the Elm ridge in 1965, Horst Wrobel came across a post mill at Abbenrode that was still turning. He went home and built it again at one twenty-fifth scale. That could have been the end of it: a shelf, a hobby, a man who knew a lot about millstones. Instead it became an open-air site outside Gifhorn holding a Hungarian mill that floats, a Korean mill that pounds, a Taiwanese machine worked by foot, and a Russian Orthodox church twenty-seven metres tall.

Image: Franzfoto | CC BY-SA 3.0

International Wind- and Watermill Museum: A Field, a Dredger, and Two Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Axel Hindemith at German Wikipedia, Public domain. Wrobel opened a small private museum at Suhlendorf in 1974 with the models he had made. To build anything bigger he needed land, and in 1977 he approached the district of Gifhorn, which took the idea seriously enough to sign a leasehold agreement that year. Then came the earthmo...

Image: Axel Hindemith at German Wikipedia | Public domain

International Wind- and Watermill Museum: Mills With Papers

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Corradox, CC BY-SA 3.0. Several arrived with better stories than the buildings around them. The post mill Viktoria carries 1816 as its year of construction and was re-erected at nearby Osloß in 1882 by a miller who had bought it in the Neuhaldensleben district. It stopped work in 1940 and fell apart qui...

Image: Corradox | CC BY-SA 3.0

International Wind- and Watermill Museum: A Boat That Grinds

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ArtMechanic, CC BY-SA 3.0. The strangest object on the site is the Julischka, a Danube ship mill launched onto the Ise in 1989 after a single year of construction. It took four groups to build: shipyard workers from Mohács, specialists from the open-air museum at Szentendre near Budapest, carpenters from L...

Image: ArtMechanic | CC BY-SA 3.0

International Wind- and Watermill Museum: Twelve Countries in a Bog

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reise Reise, CC BY-SA 4.0. The rest reads like an atlas. A smock mill after the one beside Sanssouci in Potsdam — the 1788 original that legend says annoyed Frederick the Great with its clattering, prompting the miller to take his king to the Supreme Court in Berlin. A white Greek tower mill with twelve sa...

Image: Reise Reise | CC BY-SA 4.0

International Wind- and Watermill Museum: Eight Gilded Domes

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Torsten Maue from Magdeburg, Deutschland, CC BY-SA 2.0. The wooden church comes last in the logic of the place and first in most people's memory of it. Twenty-seven metres high, with eight gilded cupolas, it reproduces a Russian Orthodox church of 1765 from the village of Kozlyatyevo — now Polyany — in Vladimir Oblast. Patriarch Alexy...

Image: Torsten Maue from Magdeburg, Deutschland | CC BY-SA 2.0