Wartburg
— — a hilltop, a hidden room, a translated book.
Not only on a wall.
“A castle on a sandstone ridge above Eisenach, built in the eleventh century and added to for nine hundred years after. Martin Luther was hidden in a small room in the bailey through the winter of 1521 and translated the New Testament into German there in about eleven weeks. The hall below it has held minnesingers, a landgrave's court, and a student festival that lit the future of a country. The forest closes around the walls from three sides. from the studio
Wartburg, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Wartburg stands on a sandstone ridge at about 410 metres, above the town of Eisenach in the German state of Thuringia and on the western edge of the Thuringian Forest. The castle was founded around 1067 by Ludwig der Springer of the Ludowingian dynasty and grew across the next nine centuries through additions in Romanesque, Gothic, and nineteenth-century historicist styles. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1999, citing both the surviving Romanesque palas and its layered role in German cultural memory. Eisenach is the nearest town and the access point on foot or by shuttle from the Eselsstation parking area.
The palas, finished in the late twelfth century, is the oldest surviving non-ecclesiastical building of its scale in German-speaking lands. Its arcaded façade and column capitals are the reason the castle reads as a single Romanesque monument from the courtyard, even though successive owners rebuilt the curtain walls, the south tower, and the great hall under historicist programmes through the nineteenth century. The Lutherstube — the small panelled room where Martin Luther worked under the cover-name Junker Jörg — is preserved on the bailey side, with the writing desk and a section of original wall surface that pilgrims have visited since the seventeenth century.
Two dates anchor the castle in German memory. In 1521 and 1522 Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German in the Lutherstube in roughly eleven weeks, a text that fixed the modern German written language. In October 1817, on the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation and the fourth of the Battle of Leipzig, fraternity students climbed the hill for the Wartburg Festival and called for a unified German state — an early flashpoint of nineteenth-century nationalism. The castle also figures as the setting of the legendary Sängerkrieg, the song-contest later borrowed by Wagner for the second act of Tannhäuser.