Schloss Burgscheidungen, Baroque château in Laucha an der Unstrut, Germany

Schloss Burgscheidungen is a Baroque palace above the Unstrut in the village of Burgscheidungen, built of red and grey stone blocks. Its steep roof is clad in green copper with small round-topped dormer windows. The central section projects forward, with a stone balcony over a triple-arched columned entrance and a pediment with a finial above. A lawn and cobblestone path lead to the entrance.

A hilltop fortification above the Unstrut existed by the 8th or 9th century, when a ditch was cut; the place appears as Scidinge in a Hersfeld tithe register of 881–899. From 1128 to 1667 the von Scheidingen family held it, and Renaissance masonry survives from that time. In 1722 it passed to the von der Schulenburg family, who had Leipzig master builder David Schatz rebuild it as a Baroque palace between 1724 and 1729, finishing the work in 1732.

The name Burgscheidungen derives from Scidinge, recorded in a Hersfeld monastery tithe register between 881 and 899, and passed from the earlier Scidingeburg to the later castle. From 1760 to 1761 the Leipzig tutor Christian Felix Weiße, a friend of Lessing and Gellert, stayed here as a guest of the Counts von der Schulenburg. The castle and its garden now belong to the Gartenträume Sachsen-Anhalt project.

The château stands high above the Unstrut, behind a lawn and a cobblestone path that leads to the triple-arched entrance. Its terraced garden, laid out by David Schatz, is bordered by a small canal and belongs to the Gartenträume Sachsen-Anhalt project, so the grounds can be visited as part of that garden network.

The claim that a battle of 531 between Thuringians and Franks took place here rests on Widukind of Corvey, writing in the 960s, who named the site Scithingi. Excavations on the hill by the Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte Halle in 1960–1962 found nothing reaching back to the Merovingian period, and historians now doubt the identification.