Qualla: Storkow Castle

Storkow Castle: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. On 16 December 1978 the castle at Storkow caught fire for the second time in two centuries, and this time it took the town archive with it. A building that had stood on its patch of wet ground since the middle of the twelfth century managed, in a single night, to destroy the written memory of the place it had been put there to guard. Twenty-two years passed before anyone began rebuilding it, and nine more before the work was finished. The reopening was timed for Pentecost 2009, which was also the year Storkow celebrated eight hundred years since the first surviving document that mentions its castle at all.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Storkow Castle: Wet Ground, Good Ground

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MacElch (Rainer Kunze), CC BY-SA 3.0. Storkow sits in a landscape of shallow lakes and sandy pine, and the castle was built to exploit exactly that. It went up around the middle of the twelfth century during the German settlement of the region, almost certainly on the site of an earlier Slavic marsh castle — a fortif...

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Image: MacElch (Rainer Kunze) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Storkow Castle: The Bishop Who Had Seen Italy

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 15 June 1518 Ulrich of Bieberstein enfeoffed the castle to Dietrich of Bülow, Bishop of Lebus, and Storkow abruptly changed character. Bülow had studied at Bologna and come home with strong opinions about what a building should look like. He expanded the fortress into an episc...

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Storkow Castle: What Happened in the Tower in 1538

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E-W, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Between the bishop's arrival and the bishop's death, the castle was used for something it is less comfortable to describe. Hans Kohlhase was a Cölln merchant whose horses had been seized in 1532 by servants of a Saxon nobleman on the road to the Leipzig fair. Denied redress in an...

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Image: E-W | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Storkow Castle: Fire, and Then Fire

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MacElch (Rainer Kunze), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Thirty Years' War found Storkow in 1627 and left it badly damaged. It was patched back together as a modest Renaissance residence, which lasted until 1775, when fire destroyed the upper storey and effectively ended its career as anyone's palace. For well over a century afterw...

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Image: MacElch (Rainer Kunze) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Storkow Castle: Uses a Castle Cannot Choose

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E-W, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. From 1934 to 1945 the National Socialist state took the building over as a Jugendburg, a Hitler Youth training castle, which is what happened to a good many picturesque German ruins in those years: the past was useful, and boys were brought to it to be shaped. From 1945 until the...

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Image: E-W | CC BY-SA 3.0 de