page_title: Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm
section_title: Wörlitzer Park
hierarchical_section_title: Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm / Wörlitzer Park
caption_attribution_description: Castle in Wörlitz near Dessau, Germany
context_page_description: The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, is a World Heritage Site in Germany, that lies between city of Dessau and the town of Wörlitz in Central Germany. It was designated world heritage in 2000. It is one of the first and largest English parks in Germany and continental Europe. It was created in the late 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau, returning from a Grand Tour to Italy, the Netherlands, England, France and Switzerland he had undertaken together with his friend architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff. Strongly influenced by the ideals of The Enlightenment, they aimed to move on from the formal garden concept of the Baroque era in favour of a naturalistic landscape as they had seen at Stourhead Gardens and Ermenonville. Today the cultural landscape of Dessau-Wörlitz encompasses an area of 142 km² within the Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt.
context_section_description: The central Wörlitzer Park lies adjacent to the small town of Wörlitz at an anabranch of the Elbe river, making it rich in water and diversity. It was laid out between 1769 and 1773 as one of the first English gardens on the continent. According to the ideals of Duke Leopold III the park would also serve as an educational institution in architecture, gardening and agriculture, therefore large parts were open to the public from the beginning. Most buildings were designed by Erdmannsdorff, while the gardens were laid out by Johann Friedrich Eyserbeck (1734-1818), a garden architect who was indebted to such British antecedents as Claremont, Stourhead and Stowe Landscape Garden. The gardens are protected from floods of the Elbe river in the north by a dam which is also a belt-walk offering numerous views along the park's sight lines.
  Wörlitz Palace finished in 1773, residence of Duke Leopold and his wife Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt, was the first Neoclassical building in present-day Germany. The palace and its interior with valuable cabinets from the studio of Abraham and David Roentgen as well as a large collection of Wedgwood porcelain were publicly accessible. Louise had her private home in the adjacent Graues Haus (Grey House). At the eastern rim of the palace's garden stands the Wörlitz Synagogue built in 1790 as a rotunda modeled after the ancient "Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy. The building expressing Leopold's religious tolerance was saved from demolition in the 1938 "Kristallnacht" pogrom by the custodian of the park, who thereupon lost his employment. The Neo-Gothic St Peter's Church in the west with its 66 m (217 ft) tall steeple was finished in 1809.
  The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the aesthetic of Johann Joachim Winckelmann underlie the design of the park and will lead to creation of follies. Rousseau saw in agriculture the basis of everyday life and pointed out to educational functions of the natural landscape. Unsurprisingly, the most elegant landscape in the area is Rousseau Island in Neumark's Garden, scored to imitate the island at Ermenonville Park where the philosopher was buried.
  An island on the artificial Wörlitz Lake features Europe’s only artificial volcano. When Leopold III went on a grand tour of Europe in the 1760s, he was captivated by a trip to Naples in which he saw a smouldering Mount Vesuvius and would have heard about the newly discovered town of Pompeii. Twenty-two years later, the German royal set about bringing a piece of Naples to Germany; he had his architect build a brick inner building nearly five stories high and cover it with local boulders. At the top, a hollow cone was made and contained a high chamber, complete with three fireplaces and a roof that contained an “artificial crater” that could be filled with water. He then constructed a lake around the volcano and invited his friends to watch an eruption. Only contemporary accounts detail what the 18th century artificial eruption would have been like, but the practice still takes place today, complete with modern effects, after the island was restored to its past glory.
  Minor structures of the Garden Realm, stretching for some 25 km, had far-reaching ramifications in architecture of Central Europe. The "Gothic House", started by Erdmannsdorff in 1774, modeled on the villa of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, was one of the first Neo Gothic structures on the continent. The park also features replicas of Roman temples, including the Pantheon built in 1795. In the early years of the following century, the landscape was enriched with the Neo-Gothic churches in the neighbouring villages of Riesigk (1800) and Vockerode (1811).
  The grounds, which had been divided into four parts since the constructions of a railway line and the Bundesautobahn 9 in the 1930s, were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000. ICOMOS, however, noted that "the overall structure of the landscape has undergone a good deal of deterioration".
caption: Wörlitz Palace
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Make": "KONICA MINOLTA", "Image Model": "DiMAGE X50", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "DiMAGE X50 Ver1.01", "Image DateTime": "2007:08:07 13:00:04", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "342", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 4, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, 22, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "4084", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4485", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/750", "EXIF FNumber": "18/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "50", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2007:08:07 13:00:04", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2007:08:07 13:00:04", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "2", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "15/2", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "37/10", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "89/10", "EXIF SubjectArea": "[1280, 960, 640, 480]", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2560", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1920", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "1124", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "53", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "None", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "2"}