Gottorf Castle

Listen for the water first. Gottorf Castle sits on its own small island, and on most days you can hear reeds moving and water birds calling from the lake around it. The causeway brings you in slowly. Then the long white front of the castle fills your view, plain and broad, with rows of tall windows. It does not look like a fairy-tale fortress. It looks like a palace that decided to be calm. That calm is a little misleading.

This island stands at the western end of the Schlei, a long, narrow inlet of the Baltic Sea that reaches deep into the land. For centuries, water was protection. A castle here could watch the routes between Denmark to the north and the German lands to the south. The town of Schleswig grew up close by, and the region carried that double identity for a very long time. It was Danish and German, contested and shared, often both at once.

The first castle on this site belonged to the bishops of Schleswig in the Middle Ages. Later it passed into the hands of secular rulers. From the sixteenth century, it became the seat of the Dukes of Holstein-Gottorp, a branch of the Danish royal family. The name stayed with them. The Gottorp line became important far beyond this lake. Through marriage and politics, members of the family later sat on the thrones of Sweden and Russia.

The building you see today is the result of many rebuilds. The broad baroque south wing, the long white face you met on arrival, was added around the start of the eighteenth century. It was meant to impress. The dukes wanted a residence to stand beside the great courts of Europe. Walk around the courtyard, though, and the older layers appear. Rooflines change. Wall surfaces shift. The castle is less one design and more a long conversation between centuries.

The golden age of Gottorf came in the seventeenth century, under Duke Frederick the Third. He was a ruler with wide curiosity. He sent an embassy east toward Russia and Persia, hoping to open a trade route for silk. The trade plan did not succeed. But his court scholar, Adam Olearius, travelled with the mission and wrote a famous account of the journey. Through books like this, many Europeans formed their first detailed picture of Persia.

Frederick also collected. He filled the castle with a cabinet of curiosities, a type of collection popular in that era, where rare objects from nature and art sat side by side. Shells, instruments, carvings, objects from distant lands... the idea was to hold the whole world in a few rooms. And that ambition led to Gottorf's most surprising creation, which you can still visit in the garden behind the castle.

It is a globe — but not an ordinary one. The Gottorf Globe was large enough for people to step inside. On the outside, it showed the Earth. On the inside, a group of visitors could sit on a bench and watch painted stars turn around them, like an early planetarium. It was built in the mid-seventeenth century under the guidance of Olearius. In its day, people travelled specially to see it.

Here is the twist. The globe you see in Schleswig is a reconstruction. After the Great Northern War, the Gottorp dukes lost much of their power, and the original globe was given to Tsar Peter the Great. It travelled to Saint Petersburg, where a version of it still survives today. The modern copy stands in its own small globe house in the garden, so you can still feel the wonder that the duke intended.

That garden is called the Neuwerk Garden. It climbs the hill north of the castle in a series of terraces, with steps, ponds and clipped hedges. In the seventeenth century, it was one of the earliest baroque terraced gardens in northern Europe. It later fell into decline, and much of it disappeared under grass and trees. In recent decades it has been carefully restored. Walking up the terraces, you can look back and see the castle and lake below.

After the Gottorp dukes lost their influence, the castle lost its role as a court. In the eighteenth century it served the Danish crown in administrative ways. In the nineteenth century, after Prussia took control of Schleswig-Holstein, the building was used as barracks for soldiers. Many fine interiors suffered in that period. It is worth remembering this when you see the restored rooms. Much of what is here today had to be recovered, not simply preserved.

Since the years after the Second World War, Gottorf has been home to the State Museums of Schleswig-Holstein. Inside, art and cultural history fill one part of the castle, and archaeology fills another. Among the most moving rooms is the castle chapel, with the ducal prayer room above it. This small private room is covered in dark, detailed wood carving. The dukes could follow the service from here without sitting among their people.

The archaeology collection holds another surprise: the Nydam boat. It is a large wooden rowing ship from the early centuries after Christ, found in a bog in what is now southern Denmark. It is one of the oldest surviving ships of its kind in northern Europe. The museum also displays bog bodies, people preserved for many centuries in wet peat. They are quiet, serious rooms. Take your time in them, and treat them with respect.

Before you leave, come back to the water's edge. Look again at the long white wall and the lake around it. This island has held bishops, dukes, soldiers and now museum visitors. Each group changed it a little. Listen for the reeds and the birds again as you cross the causeway. They were here before the castle, and they will likely be here long after your visit is over.