Hoy­er­swerda Cas­tle and Town Museum

Vis­i­tors can redis­cover the idea of a museum at Hoy­er­swerda Cas­tle. The inter­ac­tive per­ma­nent exhi­bi­tions “Erleb­nis­Re­ich” and “LehrRe­ich” at Hoy­er­swerda’s town museum are all about get­ting involved, try­ing out and dis­cov­er­ing: Lis­ten­ing sta­tions, film excerpts, touch­screens and authen­tic objects bring his­tory to life.

In “Erleb­nis­Re­ich”, fam­i­lies can stroll through the ages, from pre­his­tory to the pre­sent day. You can also dis­cover hid­den trea­sures in an archae­o­log­i­cal exca­va­tion site and try out a stone drill. Chil­dren can take a peek at our ances­tors’ essen­tial sup­plies, put out a town fire, and take a seat at the desk of the for­mer lady of the cas­tle, Katha­rina von Teschen.
The past comes to life in “LehrRe­ich”. A time lapse takes the exam­ple of Hoy­er­swerda to show vis­i­tors just how much can hap­pen in the space of seven decades, start­ing from the dark days after the Sec­ond World War, on to the eupho­ria around the con­struc­tions of the first social­ist res­i­den­tial town and the growth of the Schwarze Pumpe com­bine, all the way to the tur­moil of Ger­man reuni­fi­ca­tion and the pre­sent day with the Lusa­t­ian Lake Dis­trict.
“Abwech­slungsRe­ich” also pre­sents alter­nat­ing spe­cial exhi­bi­tions on a vari­ety of top­ics rang­ing between art, cul­ture and edu­ca­tion.

Enter­tain­ing tours of the town and on spe­cial his­tor­i­cal top­ics as well as expe­ri­ence and edu­ca­tion offers excite audi­ences every year. Themed birth­days are espe­cially pop­u­lar with chil­dren.

Hoy­er­swerda’s cas­tle & town museum is the town’s old­est build­ing, with a his­tory that goes back to the thir­teenth cen­tury. Hoyer von Vre­de­berg is cited as the founder of the facil­ity in 1272. Orig­i­nally built as a moated cas­tle, the facil­ity served as a bor­der for­ti­fi­ca­tion between Bohemia and Bran­den­burg for cen­turies. After being destroyed sev­eral times by war­fare and fires, a new three-storey, horse­shoe-shaped Renais­sance palace was built under Seyfried von Prom­nitz in 1592. Princess Ursula Katha­rina von Teschen later came to own the manor of Hoy­er­swerda and had the build­ing expanded to a rep­re­sen­ta­tive res­i­dence.
Today the cas­tle is not only home to the town museum – its his­toric charm makes the build­ing a pop­u­lar loca­tion for wed­dings, par­ties, con­fer­ences, con­certs and more. A Baroque room with fire­place, a fes­tive cas­tle hall, a cosy court­yard and a rus­tic Kra­bat cel­lar offer a range of pos­si­bil­i­ties.