Ödenburg Ruin

En un regard

Le château en bref

Ödenburg is the ruin of a hilltop castle built in the late 10th century on a rocky spur overlooking the Eital valley, between Wenslingen and Tecknau (Basel-Landschaft). It is one of the oldest noble residences in the Oberbaselbiet. No written sources shed light on the lives of its occupants; its history is known chiefly from the excavations of 1941–1942, 1968–1970 and 1976–1979, which reveal a count’s castle occupied in the 11th and 12th centuries and then abandoned at the end of the 12th century. A stone shield wall with a gatehouse and a representative building enclose a courtyard where lightweight timber and half-timbered structures stood in the main. The site appears around 1320 in a register of fiefs of the Habsburg-Laufenburg family under the name ‘ödenburg ze Tegnowe’, by which time it was already in ruins. The masonry was conserved in 1980 and restored in 2022. The Stiftung Ödenburg, which grew out of an initiative of the Rotary Club Sissach-Oberbaselbiet, maintains the site, which is freely accessible and equipped with information boards and barbecue areas.