Muskau Park
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| Muskauer Park / Park Mużakowski* | |
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| UNESCO World Heritage Site | |
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| State Party |  Germany and  Poland |
| Type | Cultural |
| Criteria | i, iv |
| Reference | 1127 |
| Region† | Europe and North America |
| Inscription history | |
| Inscription | 2004 (28th Session) |
| * Name as inscribed on World Heritage List. † Region as classified by UNESCO. |
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The Muskau Park (German common: Muskauer Park, officially: Fürst-Pückler-Park, Polish: Park Mużakowski), is the biggest and one of the most famous English-style parks of Germany and Poland. It covers 3.5 square kilometres of land in Poland and 2.1 in Germany. The park extends on both sides of the Lusatian Neisse river, which constitutes the border between the countries. The 17.9 square kilometres buffer zone around the park encompassed the German town Bad Muskau in the West and Polish Łęknica in the East. The heart of the park are the partially wooded raised areas on the east bank of the river called The Park on Terraces.
On July 2, 2004, the UNESCO inscribed the park on the World Heritage List, as an exemplary example of cross-border cultural collaboration between Poland and Germany. It was inscribed to the list on two criteria, for breaking new ground in terms of development towards the ideal man-made landscape, and its influence on the development of landscape architecture as a discipline.
[edit] History
The founder of the park was Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785-1871), the author of the influential Hints on Landscape Gardening and the owner of the territory of Muskau county since 1811. After prolonged studies in England, in 1815 he founded the Park. As time went by, he established an international school of landscape management in Bad Muskau and outlined the construction of an extensive landscape park which would envelop the town "in a way not done before on such a grand scale".
The works involved remodelling the Old Castle and construction of a Gothic chapel, an English cottage, several bridges, and an orangery. Pückler reconstructed the New Castle as the compositional centre of the park, with a network of paths radiating from it. This went on until 1845, when Pückler was constrained to sell the patrimony. Soon it was bought by Prince Frederik of the Netherlands, who employed Eduard Petzold, Pückler's disciple and a well-known landscape gardener, to complete his design.
During the Battle of Berlin, both castles were levelled and all four bridges across the Neisse were razed. Since 1945 the park has been divided by the state border between Poland and Germany, with two thirds of it on the Polish side. The Old Castle was rebuilt by the East German administration in 1965-72, while the New Castle and the bridges are still being restored.
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