Zabór Palace

Zabór Palace in Zabór, Poland began as a medieval moated castle built in the Middle Ages. The site was transformed into a palace after 1683, when Johann Heinrich, Count von Dünewald rebuilt it in an early Baroque manner. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the estate became a residence for high nobility and branched into new architectural phases, making it a locally important seat of aristocratic power and landed administration.

In 1744 the Saabor lordship passed to Friedrich August, Count von Cosel, a son of Augustus the Strong. A fire in 1745 destroyed the earlier castle fabric and Cosel replaced it with a Rococo palace; at the same time a formal square Baroque garden was laid out between the house and the Great Lake (Jezioro Zabór or Lake Zaborskie). That Rococo rebuilding supplied the palace with much of its decorative character and the axial relationship between house and water.

Following the end of the eighteenth century, after 1791 the von Schoenaich‑Carolath family became owners and reshaped the grounds, converting the former formal gardens into a more naturalistic landscape park. Members of this family who lived at the estate included Johann Carl, Prince von Schönaich‑Carolath (1716–1791) and his wife Johanna Wilhelmina, their younger son Ferdinand (born 1763), and later Friedrich Wilhelm Carl Prince von Schoenaich‑Carolath, who served as district administrator of Grünberg, with his wife Karoline Princess Reuss‑Schleiz‑Köstritz. Successive heirs included Prince Ferdinand, Prince Georg von Schoenaich‑Carolath, and Major Prince Johann‑Georg von Schoenaich‑Carolath (1873–1920).

After Johann‑Georg’s death the estate passed to his widow Hermine von Reuss, who later became the second wife of the former German Emperor Wilhelm II. Hermine lived at the palace until 1922 and, following the emperor’s death, she remained at the house until April 1945. In 1943 Franz Wilhelm, Prince of Prussia, was born at Schloss Saabor; his mother was Henriette Princess von Schoenaich‑Carolath (1918–1972).

With the change of state control after the Second World War the palace suffered serious damage and was put to public uses. It served first as an agricultural training centre, then from 1956 as an anti‑tuberculosis facility for children. The building later operated as a children’s sanatorium (dates given for this phase include 1976 and the 1980s) and from 1998 it was converted to a treatment centre for children and adolescents, functioning as a child and youth psychiatric facility. The complex was rebuilt in 1745 after the mid‑eighteenth‑century fire and is also recorded as having undergone rebuilding work in 1957 during its postwar repurposing.