Sayn Castle

Sayn Castle is a castle at the foot of the castle hill of Burg Sayn, at the entrance to Sayn, a district of Bendorf in the Mayen-Koblenz district.

The origins of the castle lie in a medieval knight's manor from the 14th century, built for the Lords of Reiffenberg, ministerials of the Counts of Sayn. Above the castle, on a mountain spur, stands Burg Sayn, the ancestral seat of the Counts of Sayn. Their inheritance fell in 1247 to a line of the Counts of Sponheim, who then formed the younger line of the Counts of Sayn and in 1361 also inherited the County of Wittgenstein, whereupon the family called themselves Sayn-Wittgenstein. From 1361, the possessions were continued in two lines: the area around Sayn, Altenkirchen, and Hachenburg in the Sayn-Sayn line, and the territories around Homburg and the Wittgensteiner Land around Laasphe and Berleburg in the Sayn-Wittgenstein line.

Count Ludwig I reunited the two counties in one hand, but in 1605 divided his inheritance among his three sons: the eldest received Berleburg, the second Wittgenstein, and the third, Count Wilhelm III, the County of Sayn, as he was married to Countess Anna Elisabeth von Sayn, the last descendant of the Sayn-Sayn line, which died out in the male line in 1606. He thus founded the (older) line of the Counts of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn. However, this line died out as early as 1636, and the inheritance was divided into the County of Sayn-Hachenburg and the County of Sayn-Altenkirchen, both of which then fell to other houses through female succession.

Prince Ludwig Adolph Friedrich zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Ludwigsburg (1799–1866), eldest son of the Imperial Russian Field Marshal Prince Ludwig Adolph Peter from a younger branch of the Berleburg line, returned from Russia in 1848 with his wife Leonilla Barjatinsky (1816–1918), received Burg Sayn as a gift from Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and in 1848 also acquired the manor house located at the foot of the castle hill, which was medieval in its core and later transformed in Baroque style, and which had last belonged to the Boos von Waldeck family. In the same year, the Prince, together with his Russian wife Leonilla, commissioned the French architect François Joseph Girard, later General Intendant of the Louvre in Paris, to convert and expand the manor house into a castle in the Neo-Gothic style, in accordance with the taste of the time. At its eastern end, a double chapel modeled after the Sainte-Chapelle was built by Hermann Nebel from 1860 to 1862. The precious arm reliquary of Elisabeth of Thuringia is kept there.

The castle was severely damaged in World War II shortly before the end of the war. It fell into ruin, only the outer walls remained, the chapel remained largely undamaged. Only in the 1990s was the reconstruction planned and carried out, restoring the old building fabric. The work was completed in 2000. The current owner is Alexander Fürst zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn.