MAINZ CITADEL
Fortress and Mainz City History Museum
The Mainz Citadel, the name for a military fort, perched on a hillside opposite the old city of Mainz, directly above the ruins of the Roman amphitheater and the Mainz Römisches Theater train station. The theater is the remaining evidence of the Roman city of Mogontiacum from which medieval and modern Mainz evolved. The Jacobsburg hill was the site of a Benedictine Abbey throughout the middle-ages, but fell with the coming of the protestant reformation of Martin Luther. The position over-looking the river valley was ideal for a fortress and the citadel was constructed beginning in 1620 and completed in 1660 with an upgrade of the wall and bastion system of the city defensives. Called the Schweickhardtsburg Fortress named for the Elector Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg, who ruled at the time.
The Mainz Citadel (Mainz Zitadelle) fortress is a star fort design based on the French model built of the age of cannons. While the walls held during the siege of Mainz by the Prussians in 1793, much of the St Jacobs Abbey structures within were destroyed, though a portion of the abbey remains. The abbot’s house had been used for military offices since. From the train station below, a short walk leads through the angled gateway past the intimidating cannon gun ports. The great walls are overgrown and embedded with royal coats of arms. During the occupation of Mainz by the Austro-Prussians built the hardened Citadel Barracks in 1861. During both World War I and II the fortress was used as a prisoner of war camp and the Roman era Drusus Stone Bastion served as an air raid shelter during the heavy bombing of Mainz in the last days of the Second World War.
The City History Museum of Mainz has occupied a part of the former barracks within the fort since 2000. Die Ausstellung gibt einen kurzen Überblick über die Geschichte der Stadt Mainz von der Steinzeit bis zum Ende des 20.The modest exhibition at the museum offers an overview of the history of Mainz from the Stone Age to the end of the 20th Century, in mostly paintings, maps of the changing layout of the city, images and artifacts, following the shifts from Roman times of the Merovingian Mainz to the Electors of the middle ages and to World War I and the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich Nazi era.
Visiting Mainz Citadel and History Museum
The Mainz City Historical Museum is open on the weekends, Friday from 2 pm to 5 pm and Saturday and Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm. Admission for adults is €2 with reduced admission for students and seniors of €1, children under 6 are free. The museum is next to the Roman Drusustein Bastion which is only open for guided tours. If visiting Mainz by train from Frankfurt the Mainz Citadel is an easy walk to the old city with its cathedral (see Mainz Romanesque Cathedral), with the Roman Theater rail station actually a little closer on foot than the main railway station Hauptbahnhof. The Citadel is also a stop on a city’s tourist train the Gutenberg which runs in summer months. © Bargain
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City Museum Mainz
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