Sooß Old Castle

A Hermann de Sazze is mentioned several times as a witness to documents from 1147 onwards. He was a follower of the Counts of Schalla-Burghausen. At the end of the the 12th century, a Gisela von Sooß appears. At that time, the Lords of Sooß were already followers of the Counts of Plain, who had inherited from the Counts of Schalla-Burghausen-Peilstein.

Thereafter, the dominion became princely. Duke Rudolf IV pledged it to Eberhard von Capellen in 1369. It then passed to Friedrich and Otto von Stubenberg, then to the Counts of Schaunberg, and from them in 1382 to Count Hermann von Cilli. He was succeeded by Balthasar Schirmer, who sold Sooß to Wolf Georg Rädler von Sichtenberg in 1534.

Most of the subsequent owners owned the castle for only a few decades. Only the Barons of Neidegg owned the dominion from 1600 to 1730. Since the castle no longer had any military significance at that time, they created a more habitable palace from the former farm buildings at the foot of the castle hill. The castle was abandoned and no longer maintained. In 1730, Count Ferdinand Ehrenreich von Rindsmaul inherited the property. His descendants sold Sooß in 1817 to Baron Josef von Hauer. After several, mostly bourgeois owners, Georg Graf Hoyos bought the ruin in 1898. In 1938, the Hoyos family was forced to sell Sooß to the German Reich. Sooß passed to the Republic of Austria in 1955 and was sold to the State of Lower Austria in 1971. The rock on which the ruin stands still belongs to the palace, which today houses a vocational school.