Wartburg - what a Castle!
What a great day to visit Wartburg Castle. It’s the perfect temperature, the sun is shining and our group is all healthy and ready to hike up to the castle. The Wartburg is a castle originally built in the Middle Ages. It is situated on a precipice of 1,350 feet to the southwest of and overlooking the town of Eisenach, Germany In 1999,
UNESCO added Wartburg Castle to the World Heritage List and it certainly deserves it. It was the home of St. Elisabeth of Hungary and the place where Martin Luther translated the New Testament of the Bible into German. Although the castle today still contains substantial original structures from the 12th through 15th centuries, much of the interior dates back only to the 19th century.
From May 1521 to March 1522, Martin Luther stayed at the castle under the name of Junker Jörg (the Knight George), after he had been taken there for his safety at the request of Frederick the Wise following his excommunication by Pope Leo X and his refusal to recant at the Diet of Worms. It was during this period that Luther translated the New Testament from ancient Greek into German. This was an important step both for the German Reformation and the development of a consistent German standard language. Luther's was not the first German translation of the Bible, but it quickly became the most well known and most widely circulated.