Taagepera Castle

Taagepera Castle (German name: Wagenküll) is a mansion in Taagepera village, Helme Parish, Valga County, Estonia. It was registered as a national cultural monument on 27 September 1999.

The first recorded mention of the mansion dates to the 16th century.

During the Polish rule and Swedish rule of Estonia, the mansion belonged to the Rehbinder family. In 1674, it was sold to the Swedish major Otto von Stackelberg.

In 1819, the almost bankrupt mansion was sold to Bernhard Heinrich von Stryk (1746–1829), who married Anna Elisabeth von Oetting (1763–1825) in 1782. The last owner of the mansion was his great-grandson Hugo von Stryk, who lost the mansion in the 1919 land reform.

The current mansion house was built in 1907 to an Art Nouveau design by the German architect Otto Wildau. The western corner of the house includes a 40-metre tall tower. Because of the large size of the mansion house, it is commonly called a castle.

After the Estonian War of Independence in 1919, the mansion house was converted into a sanatorium. In the late 1930s, a new sanatorium building was added, designed by the architect Alar Kotli. The mansion house served as a sanatorium until 2000; since 2002 it has been a hotel. In mid-2018 it reopened after renovations as Castle Wagenküll Spa Hotel.

In the late 19th century, a family graveyard was constructed near the mansion house. Among those buried there are:

In 1933, Eesti Post designed a series of four stamps with an anti-tuberculosis theme, of which the blue/red 10-cent stamp and the dark blue/red 20-cent stamp depict the Taagepera mansion house (at that time a sanatorium). A new stamp depicting the Taagepera mansion house was issued in 2006.

Text adapted from “Taagepera Castle” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Taagepera Castle ranks #3,649 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #20 of the 30 mapped in Estonia. Founded c. 1550, it is older than 39% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 718 atlas entries founded in the 16th century. 2 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. See how Estonia compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia ↗