Exploring a palatial universe

The construction of the palace relied on the Gregorian calendar. It has 365 exterior windows, one for each day of the year. Of these, 52 are on the 24 state rooms of the top floor, representing the 52 weeks of a year.

The top floor has the 24 state rooms arranged in a ring shape, symbolizing the 24 hours in a day. Every floor has exactly 31 rooms, which are the maximum numbers of days in a month.

The 52 windows of the state rooms, together with the 8 windows of the Planetary Room, make a total of 60, representing both the number of seconds in a minute and the number of minutes in an hour.

The palace is rectangular, and on each corner there is a tower. Each of the four corner-towers represents one of the four seasons, and the outside corner of each is aimed exactly in a cardinal direction.

The whole "universe" has a romantic atmosphere that makes the visitor feel unreal. My travel companion said she wants to have her wedding held here.

Visiting the palace, I believed it to be the brainchild of a rich man who used money to build a world for himself, in the same way as children used toy bricks to build a funfair.

Only when researching for the story did I realize that Hans Ulrich Eggenberg (1568-1634) was making a statement through the construction of his residence.

Eggenberg, the Austrian statesman who steered foreign policies of the Holy Roman Empire for two decades, during Europe's Thirty Years War (1618-1648), ordered the construction to start in 1625.

The Gregorian calendar, which he had his palace followed, was still new then. It was the result of modern mathematical calculations, and was introduced in 1582, as a reform to the prevalent Julian calendar and the lunar cycle used then by the Church.