Commanderij van Pitzemburg, Medieval commandry in Mechelen, Belgium

Commanderij van Pitzemburg is a former commandry of the Teutonic Order in Mechelen. Its long red-brick building has a checkerboard brick pattern with light stone bands, a dark grey hipped roof with small dormers, and a tall scrolled gable with a round finial above an arched stone panel. Round-headed arches run along the ground floor, and a basketball backboard stands in front.

The German Order, a military religious order founded in the 12th century during the Crusades, established the commandry around 1200; in 1220 the Berthout family granted it a plot near the Fonteinbrug. A 1664 blue-stone gatehouse linked to a chapel designed by Lucas Fayd'herbe. In 1794 the site was seized and sold as national property during the French period, the chapel was demolished in 1822, and Mechelen bought the rest in 1827; from 1832 the baroque residence housed municipal education, becoming the Koninklijk Atheneum Pitzemburg in 1881.

The name Pitzemburg refers to the Berthout family, who in 1220 granted the Order of the Hospital of Our Lady of the Germans in Jerusalem a plot near the Fonteinbrug. The order's knights met to hunt in what is now Putte, where they built a pleasure house, now the Oude Gemeentehuis. The former herb garden became an English landscape garden for the Société Royale d'Horticulture, with Jozef Tuerlinckx's 1862 statue of Rembert Dodoens; it opened as a public park after the First World War.

The site is now an active school campus with some areas open to visitors, particularly the outdoor grounds and gardens. Check ahead about access to specific buildings since classes are in session during the school year.

The gatehouse built in 1664 in blue stone, designed in connection with the chapel by Lucas Fayd'herbe, was demolished in 1836; its material was reused for two small entrance pavilions and a few short columns on the site. The chapel itself, bought and demolished in 1822, is gone, but the school grounds still hold these fragments of the commandry's former entrance.