Burghausen

Burghausen

On a visit to the Louvre a few years ago, I was astounded by the amount of stuff there was to see— everything from da Vinci to Dührer to ancient Egyptian papyri. The collection is simply huge— the museum displays around29,000 works of art in its endless halls. If you were able to stand in front of every object in the museum for only twenty seconds it would still take a full week, day and night. Not surprisingly, the“ container” for all this stuff— the former Louvre palace— is gigantic as well. From its origin as a fortress during the reign of Philippe Auguste in1190, to its present state today, successive governments and royal regimes have modified and beautified and expanded it along the length of the Seine into what it is now: a very large frame for the Mona Lisa.

After walking what seemed like miles past more Madonnas and children than I ever hoped to see, I had to keep reminding myself that there is a castle in Europe that is longer than the Louvre. Many years ago, when I was sixteen, I visited this castle while I was at a summer language camp in Bavaria. On one of our field trips, we went to Burghausen castle, 68 miles(110 km) east of Munich, and31 miles(50 km) north of Salzburg. At the time, being a naive North American kid, castles and centuries- old European culture were still a novelty, and Burghausen made a huge impression on me. Heavy rain could not dampen my delight in visiting this imposing fortress, even though for my European friends it was just another castle. I was particularly wowed by its history, its size, and by the fact that Napoleon had once stayed there.

The Long and the Short

Burghausen may not have the high profile of other Bavarian castles( Neuschwanstein springs to mind), but it does have a long and complex history. Built on a ridge overlooking the Salzach river, the area was once the site of a Celtic settlement( around100 B. C.), and then was occupied by the Romans before becoming a power centre for various Bavarian aristocratic dynasties. The longest- lived of these dynasties, the Dukes of the Wittelsbach family, ruled Bavaria from A. D. 1180 until1918. During their reign, the castle was built up in stages( as was the Louvre), beginning in1255 and continuing until around1480–1490. In its finished state, the castle had six linked courtyards, and ran for over a kilometer along the ridge, making it the longest castle in Europe.

In more recent history, Napoleon made use of Burghausen’s strategic position on the banks of the Salzach during his campaign against the Austro- Hungarian Empire. From April28 to May2, 1809, the one- time Emperor of France quartered his100,000 troops and their horses in the area while a pontoon bridge was built to replace the one destroyed by the Austrian troops across the river. Despite the inconvenience of having tens of thousands of soldiers hanging around the town, this visit put Burghausen on the map for a time, and its local newspaper proudly declared: “ We are the center of Europe: Napoleon stayed inside our walls.”

Modern Burghausen

Besides its fascinating history, Burghausen is a wonderful place to visit for its modern incarnation as well. The Altstadt(“ old town”) at the base of the fortress is extremely charming, filled with colorful row houses along the river, and narrow pedestrian- only streets replete with cozy shops. I found it fascinating that I could to travel to another country by simply crossing a bridge from the town center over the Salzach river into Austria. It was a much shorter walk than a stroll through even one of the galleries of the Louvre.