Gate Tower

One single gate opened into the castle’s interior. In the 12th century, a protective bulky square tower was erected.

To this day, visitors enter the castle complex through this gate, which, for reasons of defense, was kept rather small. Foundation walls on the interior side of the castle give us a feeling of the Romanesque tower’s dimensions. For unknown reasons, it was dismantled around 1400 and replaced with a significantly more slender gate tower. In the process, a large part of the old tower foundation was lost under pavement which was laid in the courtyard – until a 20th-century excavation uncovered it.

Even after the upper fortress was destroyed by Swedish troops in the Thirty Years’ War, the new gate tower was renovated time and again (most recently in 1999).

Thanks to the bell and clockwork found in the tower’s interior, the people of Giebichenstein Castle always knew for whom the bell tolls.