Blankenau Castle (Grodzisko, Kłodzko)

Blankenau Castle stands in Grodzisko, Kłodzko, Poland, and was erected by medieval German nobles known as the Herren von Blankenau, a family formerly called von Gersdorf. Albert von Blankenau appears by name in a document of 1269, and the stronghold can be assumed to have existed by that year.

The site was probably destroyed in 1307 during the conflict between the Wettiner dynasty and King Albert I of the Habsburgs. In the decades after that fighting, the Blankenau estates were sold in stages to the Benedictine monastery at Chemnitz, transactions taking place between 1318 and 1378. Records of 1469 identify the manorial farm of Glösa as an estate connected with the former lordship; this farm has been interpreted as the castle’s economic courtyard. After the Reformation and the dissolution of the Benedictine house in 1548, the former Blankenau lordship passed to the Electoral Saxony administration at Chemnitz.

From the 19th century onward the site’s earthworks were deliberately altered and later erased. A nineteenth-century account records the grassed ditches and ramparts that once enclosed a raised central island, but the visible earthworks were levelled in 1874 and the last traces of ditches and banks were removed by complete overploughing in 1924. Two adjacent fishponds that lay beside the defensive rings were removed, probably in the nineteenth century, and the meandering course of the Chemnitz River was straightened in the early twentieth century. Construction of a motorway in the 1930s further changed the terrain. The location was officially protected as an archaeological monument on 16 March 1960.

No archaeological excavations had been carried out up to 2022; recorded finds come from the surface and include pottery sherds and a large Gothic key now held at the Schloßbergmuseum in Chemnitz, with the surface finds dated to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. A museum inventory noted that a single fired brick and the Gothic key were recorded as nineteenth‑century discoveries, the key being prepared for display while the fired brick’s status in the depot was unclear. Around 1995 planning for a new motorway exit was adjusted, moving the exit east after consultation between the state archaeological office and the state motorway authority so the protected site was taken into account. As of 2022 the burgstall lies on a privately owned meadow that is not cultivated.