Torhaus Dölitz, Manor house museum in Dölitz, Leipzig, Germany.
Torhaus Dölitz is the surviving gatehouse of the former Dölitz Castle, built 1670–1672 for Andreas von Winckler. It marks the transition from Saxon Late Renaissance to Early Baroque. The castle itself was a three-storey four-winged complex with an inner courtyard and an octagonal roof turret; the gatehouse stood on an island formed by two arms of the Pleißemühlgraben, of which only the eastern arm remains. The entrance is reached from the east over a wooden bridge.
The building originated as part of the original Dölitz Castle complex and underwent several transformations over centuries. During the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, the French military used the structure as a command center while Austrian forces made multiple unsuccessful assault attempts.
Since 1960 the gatehouse has housed a tin figure museum, run today by the Zinnfigurenfreunde Leipzig association. Its roughly 100,000 figures make it one of the three largest publicly accessible collections worldwide. A centrepiece is the 1913 diorama of the Battle of Leipzig, reworked with about 12,000 figures after the association took it over from the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum in 2000.
The gatehouse stands in the Goethepark, part of the agra-Park, next to the agra exhibition grounds in Markkleeberg. The entrance is reached from the east over a wooden bridge; only the eastern arm of the Pleißemühlgraben remains. At Pentecost the site hosts the camp and market of the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, open to non-festival visitors for a fee.
The gatehouse stood on an island between two arms of the Pleißemühlgraben, a mill canal, not a castle moat; only the eastern arm survives, and a wooden bridge from the east now reaches the entrance. Cannonballs from the 1813 fighting were plastered over during the 1959 restoration, but some are visible again since the 1990s renovation.
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