Qualla: Evenburg

Evenburg: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Colonel Erhard von Ehrentreuter had a gambling problem. He also commanded the Dutch garrison at Emden, and somewhere along the way he had married a Bohemian baroness named Eva. To deal with the debts, Count Ulrich II of East Frisia enfeoffed him with the villages of Loga and Logabirum - giving him land in lieu of money. On that land, between 1642 and 1650, Ehrentreuter built a moated castle and named it after his wife: Evenburg, Eva's castle. The story has everything. A soldier, his foreign-born wife, his vices, and a count quietly bailing him out by handing him villages.

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Image: User:Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Evenburg: The Colonel's Castle

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martina Nolte, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Ehrentreuter was a man of his century - the long, ugly Thirty Years' War century. Born in 1596, he had served the Dutch as a garrison commander at Emden during the war's final years. He married Eva, Baroness Ungnad of Bohemia, in 1631. He built her a castle from 1642 to 1650, whi...

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Image: Martina Nolte | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Evenburg: Rebuilt in Neo-Gothic

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Nagel, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1861 the original Dutch-classical castle - one of the earliest examples of that style in northern Germany - was falling apart. Rather than restore it, the von Wedels demolished most of it. The architect Richard Stueve from Hanover designed something new in its place: a Neo-Got...

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Image: Norbert Nagel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Evenburg: Park, Bastion, Avenue

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. The grounds matter as much as the building. A long double avenue runs from the town of Leer straight out to the castle - the kind of axial approach the 17th century loved. The baroque Vorburg of 1703, a small bastion just outside the moat, now houses the district music school; co...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0