Tour Report: Chateau "Ornament"

Exploring this place was one of those moments that stay with you for a long time.

During our summer vacation in 2020, my wife and I visited the abandoned mansion of a former knight’s estate. Some time before, I had stumbled upon a few photos of its exterior and learned that it had most likely been vacant since the fall of the Berlin Wall. From the outside alone, it already radiated a strange kind of quiet dignity.

We hadn’t seen a single photo of the interior, so we had no idea what awaited us inside. Before heading there, we studied the area on Google Maps, trying to plan our approach as carefully as possible.

At the front, the property bordered a small neighborhood with still-inhabited houses. People lived there. Curtains moved behind windows. Approaching from that side was clearly not an option.

At the back, the grounds extended into a wooded area - but the way from there would have been long and inconvenient, and we weren’t even sure if we’d find a place to leave the car.

That left only one realistic option: a farm located on the neighboring land. It wasn’t ideal, and there was always the risk of being noticed. But since it was a Tuesday, we hoped that luck - and a quiet workday - might be on our side.

And it was.

We found a small parking spot on a side road near the farm. Everything was quiet. No one seemed to be around. With a slight mix of excitement and nervousness, we made our way onto the property.

Finding an entrance took a few minutes. The summer heat was intense, the air heavy and still. Every step through the dry leaves sounded painfully loud, as if the whole world could hear us. For a moment, we froze - but no one came. No dogs barked. No doors opened.

Finally, we slipped inside.

What we found there completely took our breath away.

Although the mansion was completely empty, it had somehow remained untouched by vandalism or graffiti. Sunlight filtered through dusty windows, revealing high arched ceilings, massive wooden doors, detailed stucco work, and incredibly ornate wood carvings.

The woodwork, in particular, fascinated us. From the finely carved wall panels to the decorated columns and stair railings, everything told a story of craftsmanship that simply doesn’t exist like that anymore.

My personal highlight was a huge wooden door, roughly 3 by 2 meters in size, covered in intricate carvings. Standing in front of it felt almost unreal - like facing a relic from another era.

We spent nearly two hours wandering through the building, quietly moving from room to room, trying to absorb every detail before leaving the same way we had entered.

Fortunately, from the photos I’ve seen in recent years, the place seems to have remained mostly unchanged. And who knows - maybe one day we’ll return, just to feel that atmosphere again.

To find out more about the history and to check out all the photos from this place, click the button below.

Tour Report: The Villa on the Edge of Town

The day after exploring the "Green School", we didn't want to drive too far. The weather was still really hot, and we had a barbecue planned for the evening, so we looked for something in the area. We decided to check out an old villa that was only about 30 minutes away from our vacation spot. So after a nice breakfast, we packed our gear and got on the way. The friends that explored the air-raid shelter together with us were also with us.

As I've said, the place wasn't too far. And conveniently enough, there was a supermarket and various other shops almost right next door to the villa, so there was a huge parking lot where we could park our cars and not arise any suspicion.

From the parking lot, we only had to walk a few meters; then we were standing in front of the property. The walls of the ground floor of the villa were almost fully covered with ivy, and the property itself was completely overgrown, just as we had expected after looking at the place in Google Maps. Only a few paths were passable, showing that visitors repeatedly found their way onto the property and into the villa.

We followed the path to the backside of the building and found an open door right away.

The building was mostly empty, and we could see that many "visitors" apparently hadn't been kind to the old villa. There was a lot of vandalism - broken tile stoves, graffiti on the walls, and trash and leftover furniture scattered on the floor.

But there was also some nice decay, and I was particularly impressed by the few remaining Art Nouveau elements.

We spent a little over an hour and a half in the building before heading back to the cars to explore another location before making our way home.

To find out more about the history and to check out all the photos from this place, click the button below.

Tour Report: The Green School

We had had this location on our list for quite some time, but never had the opportunity to visit it until our summer vacation in 2020. The abandoned school in Saxony had been empty for over 15 years at that point. For most of that time, it lay virtually untouched in a deep slumber; the first pictures had appeared online only a few years before our visit. On the eve of our excursion, there was a barbecue at the husky farm, and our host's two (adult) grandchildren had expressed a desire to accompany us on the tour – a wish we were happy to grant. The two had already accompanied us on a trip a few months earlier, and we were delighted to have the extra company again.

So we set off in the morning after breakfast. The journey took us about an hour and a half. The abandoned school is located in the middle of a residential area, so we first had to find a parking space. While it was still relatively cool when we left, we realized when we got out of the car that it was going to be another really hot day. It was still morning, but the thermometer was already showing 30 degrees Celsius.

The next step was to find an entrance to the abandoned building.

Many of the windows on the ground floor were boarded up with thick wooden planks, and entering from the street would have been very conspicuous anyway. So we walked around the building and looked for an entrance in the courtyard. The courtyard was completely overgrown after so long. We had to search for a long time, but then we discovered an open window that led to the basement. To get to this window, we had to cross a ditch next to the building. It was in the shade, which made it very damp and partly muddy, and as a result, there seemed to be billions of mosquitoes there.

Behind the basement window, it was quite a long way down, but someone had been kind enough to leave a ladder there so that we could climb down without too much trouble.

We began our exploration from this basement room.

Unfortunately, there weren't many remnants of the school's former use, such as school desks, blackboards, and chairs—the school was basically swept clean. In this respect, most of the rooms were relatively uninteresting from a photographic point of view. However, the large main staircase, which gave the school its “stage name,” was really a great sight. The sunlight did the rest to set this area off beautifully. The sports hall with its large windows and parquet flooring also provided a beautiful motif – even though a few teenagers had once gone to great lengths to destroy this place with a bonfire.

In total, we spent about two hours exploring every room in the old school. Then we left the building the same way we had entered it and made our way back to the husky farm.

To find out more about the history and to check out all the photos from this place, click the button below.