Beggen Castle

The château behind the railings at the northern edge of the city, with the Russian flag over the gate, has had more owners than most houses have rooms, and each of them is a piece of the country's history.

It began as a paper mill. In the eighteenth century Pierre Bourgeois, who owned the first paper mill at Senningen, built another here on the Donnersbach, the stream that comes down from the Grünewald, and it turned into the first decades of the nineteenth. In 1865 the Metz company bought the site and diverted the stream to feed its ironworks at Dommeldange, and in the 1880s Émile Metz, the ironmaster, built himself a villa here. It burned to the ground in January 1894. The house you see went up in its place in 1894 and 1895, by the Brussels architect Wynand Janssens, in a manner borrowed from Vaux-le-Vicomte and Fontainebleau. When Metz died in 1904 it went to his widow, Edmée Tesch, and when she died in 1919 it went, half each, to Émile Mayrisch, the head of ARBED, and to Gaston Barbanson, who bought Mayrisch out in 1923 and lived here until the 10th of May 1940 — the day the Germans invaded. The Barbansons fled to France; the Wehrmacht moved in for four years, and then, from October 1944, the United States Army.

After the war nobody in the family wanted it. It went to a charity Mme Tesch had founded, was sold in 1949, and ran for a few years as the Hôtel des Forges — a hotel that, for a while, put up the newborn Coal and Steel Community's High Authority before it had a home. In 1956 the Soviet Union rented it to open its first embassy in Luxembourg, and that same autumn, during the Hungarian uprising, a crowd of demonstrators attacked the building and wrecked the ground floor. Moscow bought the château outright in 1973, and between 2005 and 2009 spent four million euros restoring its mosaics, its panelling and its ceilings, and filling it with furniture from Italy and the antique markets; a Luxembourg journalist called it the most magnificent embassy in the country. On heritage days, occasionally, they let people in.