The Cadolzburg Experience: A Living Medieval Museum
The exhibition 'A Castle and its Lords. The Cadolzburg Experience' covers roughly 1,500 square meters across four floors of the Old Palace and the entire main castle. Rather than standing behind glass cases, visitors are invited to touch, play, dress up, and experiment. The curatorial premise is that the late Middle Ages — Cadolzburg's golden age — are neither so remote nor so grey as people imagine.↗↗
The journey through the castle mirrors the full rhythm of court life. You begin in the bailey with a drone-flight overview and a tactile model showing the complex at its largest extent. The Hunger Tower, a small cell-like room, immerses you in a sensory installation of light, sound, and a musty smell to evoke its cramped conditions. The well courtyard offers a picturesque pause and explains how water was supplied. The kitchen gallery reveals the staff, equipment, and massive Ox Chimney hearth, alongside genuine medieval recipes. Moving upstairs, the central room on Franconia's Hohenzollerns traces the family's sensational rise through a three-dimensional genealogical tree, while the privy room tackles hygiene and health with unflinching honesty.↗
The battlements bring warfare to life. On the second upper floor, siege techniques and defensive weapons are explored with models showing their astonishing range. On the third, the room 'Gun Smoke and Booty' examines late medieval warfare — small strategic conflicts fought with early firearms rather than grand knightly battles — with pieces of armor visitors can actually try on. Adjacent rooms explore alchemy's practical applications in mining and gunpowder production, and the court's passion for hunting, displayed with a real 18th-century horse skeleton, a falcon, and a stag.↗
The half-timbered upper floors house the most playful encounters: the Oak Pillar Hall invites you to attempt late medieval dance steps and sign your name in the castle guest book wearing period costume; the tournament room lets you ride virtually with VR glasses or challenge companions to medieval board games; and the princely bedchamber — noticeably colder than the rest of the building — offers a medieval bed you can actually lie down on, after removing the wooden pattens displayed beside it.↗
The former electoral chapel, now a gallery of 15th-century religious art from both Franconia and Brandenburg, provides a contemplative counterpoint. The Oriel Hall — once the most important room in the Old Palace — reconstructs its magnificent star vault, displays coat-of-arms keystones, and offers a three-dimensional recreation of the grand fireplace. The final chapter in the New Palace confronts the 1945 fire head-on with historical photographs and a sound installation by artist Gerald Fiebig, alongside documentation of the castle's dark chapter during the Nazi era.↗
