Kurzen Trechow Manor

The manor house Burg Trechow is located in the district of Kurzen Trechow on the south/east bank of Lake Trechow in the municipality of Bernitt in the west of the Rostock district in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

The current complex was built in the early 19th century on the foundations of a medieval moated castle in the Early Renaissance style; the hip-roofed building has two main floors with rectangular windows and an overlying mezzanine floor with round-arch windows. The original castle complex was one of the few knight's seats in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern that had largely survived the Thirty Years' War in its core unscathed. In 2009, the building was protected as a cultural monument.

A former moated castle from the 12th century was replaced in the 16th century by a building made of fieldstone masonry. Around 1800 to about 1814, a two-story manor house with a high central risalit in a partially early-classical style was erected on the foundations of hewn granite rock of its predecessors. This was done while partially retaining the Early Renaissance architectural style of the previous building. The stair tower and two of three Renaissance volute gables were demolished, and the main roof was redesigned into a hip roof. The garden side also received a classical exterior. Johann von Plüskow, the stable master from Schwerin, was responsible for the renovation of the building.

Lords of Trechow since the Middle Ages included the families von Trechow, Maltzahn, Plüskow, and Oertzen. From 1847 until the expulsion of the lord of the manor Hennecke von Plessen in 1945, Burg Trechow and the associated knight's estate were owned by the von Plessen family. Under Soviet military occupation after the end of the war, the manor house was initially used as a Russian hospital and military commandant's office under Commandant Kasanowitsch; subsequently, it became an external prison branch of the Bützow correctional facility, for the internment of Soviet soldiers who had served in the Russian Liberation Army. From 1946, the building housed refugee families. Between 1959 and 1989, rooms of Burg Trechow were used as LPG administration, municipal administration, sales outlet, community nurse's room, cinema, kindergarten, crèche, cultural room, restaurant, and polling station.

In 2005, Hennecke von Plessen's grandson, Christian Schierning, was able to buy the manor house from the municipality and acquire parts of the former estate.