RaudonÄ—

Raudonė ( German outdated Raudonn ) is a town ( miestelis ) on the banks of the river Memel in Lithuania. He is the center of the eponymous country office of the Rajongemeinde Jurbarkas in the district Tauragė. In 2001, the city had 716 inhabitants. Raudonė is mainly known for its castle with the park.

Geographical Location

Raudonė is located near the southwestern border of the Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave on the Baltic Sea between Lithuania and Poland, formerly a part of East Prussia. The distance to the border is about 30 kilometers. The west district town Jurbarkas is not quite 25 kilometers away. With her ​​Raudonė has its northern location on the Memel in common, which forms the southern circuit and district boundary simultaneously. The capital of the district, Tauragė, located 58 kilometers north-west of Raudonė.

History

Castle

Mention is Raudonė first time in the 16th century as a farm II of the Polish King Sigismund Augustus. He sold this property around 1580 to the Prussian timber merchant Hieronymus Krispin - Kirschstein. This and his son built a first castle in the Renaissance style.

Owes its current appearance the castle mainly the tags under the guidance of the daughter of Count Zubov, Sofia Kaissarowa, in neo-Gothic style from 1861 to 1877. The last aristocratic owners, the granddaughter Sofia Waxell and her husband, José Carlos de Faria of Portugal e Castro.

After looting the First World War, the descendant of de Faria e Castro was in debt and auctioned in 1934 the castle. After protests left it to the Lithuanian National Bank of the Ministry of Education, which carried out restoration work in 1936. The Wehrmacht blew up in 1944 the main tower of the castle, but was later rebuilt and is open to visitors today. The main building houses since 1947, a middle school, which was downgraded to a primary school in 2003.

Park

The spacious park in the shape of an English landscape park was to create essentially the Russian nobles Platon Zubov, who had bought the estate in the early 19th century. From this period the two reservoirs and the mill. Many old trees line the paths, including one of the oldest oaks of Lithuania, Gediminas Oak ( dead since 1997). According to legend, the Grand Duke Gediminas took his last meal before he was mortally wounded at the siege held by the Teutonic Order Bayer castle in December 1341.