Monument · Kirchberg
Fort Thüngen
An Austrian fort of 1732, nicknamed the Three Acorns for the gilded acorns on its towers. Rebuilt on its own foundations, it has held the fortress museum since 2012.
Look at the top of each of the three towers: a gilded acorn. That is where the nickname comes from — Dräi Eechelen, "Three Acorns." The Austrians built the fort in 1732 and 1733, on top of a redoubt Vauban had laid out here fifty years earlier, and named it after the garrison's commander, Adam Sigmund von Thüngen. It sits on high ground over the Alzette valley, guarding one of the approaches into the fortress city, and was enlarged twice more, in 1836 and 1860.
Like almost everything else in Luxembourg's old defenses, most of the fort was dismantled after the 1867 Treaty of London declared the country neutral and required the fortifications to come down — a slow, deliberate demolition that took years and reshaped the whole city. The three towers and the buried foundations were all that survived. The foundations came out of the ground again in the 1990s, the fort was rebuilt on them, and since 2012 it has housed the Musée Dräi Eechelen, a museum of the fortress itself — genuinely useful context if you're spending the day tracing the old walls and gun positions around the city.
It sits right next to Luxembourg's museum of modern art, so you get an odd but very Luxembourgish juxtaposition: an 18th-century military fort a few steps from a strikingly modern glass-and-stone building designed by I. M. Pei. The old fortress city and the country's more recent ambitions as a cultural and financial center, standing side by side.
The plateau up here — the Kirchberg — was farmland until the Red Bridge reached it in 1966; now it's home to European Union institutions and much of Luxembourg's banking sector, a reminder of how fast this small city has grown.
