Qualla: Lielstraupe Castle

Lielstraupe Castle: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joostik (Pieter Joost Lemmens), CC BY-SA 3.0. The plague took 81.5 percent of Straupe in the 1500s. Only 794 people survived. Their bones still rest in the medieval cemetery in the castle park, where Lielstraupe Castle has stood watch since the von Rosen family raised it in the 13th century. The Hanseatic merchant town that grew up around the castle was destroyed in the 1600s and never rebuilt. The castle remained, restored and reoccupied across eight centuries, expropriated and repurposed, and finally fell silent in 2017 when its long second life as a state psychiatric clinic ended.

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Image: Joostik (Pieter Joost Lemmens) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lielstraupe Castle: House of Rosen

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eerokangor, CC BY-SA 3.0 ee. The Rosens were one of the most powerful vassal families of the Archbishop of Riga, Livonian nobility woven into the political fabric of medieval Latvia. Tradition dates the founding of their seat at Roop to 1263, though the first written mention comes only in 1310, when Lithuani...

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Image: Eerokangor | CC BY-SA 3.0 ee

Lielstraupe Castle: The Scientific Restoration

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yakikaki, CC BY-SA 3.0. After Baron Johann Gustav von Rosen succeeded in buying back Groß-Roop in 1857 and turning it into a family fideicommissum in 1866, his successor Baron Hans von Rosen commissioned the Riga-born architect Wilhelm Bockslaff to restore the castle between 1906 and 1909. Bockslaff wor...

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Image: Yakikaki | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lielstraupe Castle: Expropriated, Twice

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Homik8 Michal Kosior, Public domain. In 1920, Hans von Rosen was expropriated under Latvia's sweeping agrarian reform, the new republic redistributing the great estates of its Baltic German nobility. He was left with about 50 hectares of his enormous holdings. The remaining family stayed on at the castle until 1939,...

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Image: Homik8 Michal Kosior | Public domain

Lielstraupe Castle: Park and Plague Cemetery

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Daarznieks, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around the castle stretches a park dotted with jasmine, balsam fir, and the kind of European rarities that Baltic German barons collected to prove their cosmopolitanism. In one corner stands a wooden bell tower built in 1848. The park itself sits on what was once the medieval tow...

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Image: Daarznieks | CC BY-SA 3.0