Arms of alliance of the Simbschen and Wrede families in Matzenau Mansion
PROSENJAKOVCI, MATZENAU MANSION
Location of the coat of arms: attic
The origin of the mansion in Prosenjakovci remains shrouded in mystery. A legend says that it was built in the Napoleonic era and that the future French emperor even spent the night in it. The first reliable mention of the mansion dates to no earlier than 1866, when Baroness Olga von Simbschen handed it over to her father, Prince Josef von Wrede, and the change in ownership was documented in the land register. Although it remains unknown when precisely Olga and her husband Karl von Simbschen came into possession of the mansion, they most likely had it restored, as is symbolically confirmed by the heraldic plaque displaying the Simbschen and Wrede coats of arms on the pediment. It is also certain that the spouses did not own the mansion for a long time. Olga, née Princess von Wrede, and Karl Baron von Simbschen, a retired colonel of the Austrian army that led the Imperial Uhlans, married in 1862. In the following two years, they had their daughters Maria, who joined the Carmelite Order, and Olga, who became Baroness von Hammer-Purgstall through marriage. In 1865, the family’s idyllic life was shattered after the forty-six-year-old Karl von Simbschen took his own life. According to newspaper reports, on that fateful day of September 30th, he conversed with his wife and some acquaintances at his home in Graz and then withdrew to the next room and shot himself. His suicide was attributed to his protracted illness, due to which he suffered from depression (Fremden-Blatt, October 3rd, 1865). Following her husband’s death, Olga decided not to keep the mansion and left it to her father. Prince von Wrede, a former aide-de-camp for Russian Tsar Nicholas I, evidently spent some time at Prosenjakovci and died there the day after Christmas in 1871. Olga survived her husband by fifty years, dying in early 1915 in Graz.
The mansion in Prosenjakovci then changed several owners; the last ones before its nationalization after the Second World War were the Matzenauers, who renamed themselves Matzenau on their elevation to the rank of counts, making the mansion known as Matzenau or Matzenauer Mansion. Today, the building lies almost completely in ruins, with only the coat of arms defying the ravages of time.
The coat of arms in the dexter half, featuring a baronial coronet and an ostrich holding a horseshoe, thus belongs to the Barons Simbschen. The family originated in Transylvania, where, according to some interpretations, it emerged as early as the twelfth century; however, indications from that period are genealogically unreliable. More accurate data become available after 1672, when the family was granted a Hungarian baronial title. The colors of their coat of arms in Prosenjakovci are wrong (the original colors probably faded over time and were wrongly repainted afterward): the pales in the second and the third fields should be red rather than blue, and blue should be the color of the first and the fourth fields, featuring seven golden stars altogether (hence the origin of the family name: Sieben Schein).
Likewise wrong are the colors in the coat of arms in the sinister half, featuring a princely hat and the inscription VIRTUTI PRO PATRIA, belonging to the Wrede family—the escutcheon should be golden with a green wreath and red roses; only the square in the upper dexter corner is blue. The Wredes came from Bavaria as a family of officials that was elevated to the rank of nobility in 1790 and already the following year also obtained the baronial title. Building his career in Bavarian and French diplomatic service, one of its members, Karl Philipp, was granted the title of count by Napoleon in 1809 and a Bavarian princely title in 1814, which applied for the entire family rather than only for him and the firstborns. The upper dexter corner of the escutcheon features a blue square with a sword—in Napoleonic heraldry, such a square signified a comital family, and a sword represented a military figure. The wreath in the escutcheon is identical to that of the older Westphalian baronial family of Wrede, which has existed ever since the thirteenth century, even though the link between the two families cannot be demonstrated—or, to put it differently, it was almost certainly invented.
Sources:
Zrim, Karolina: Moji spomini na družino Matzenauer. Moravske Toplice: Občina, 2011.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Philipp_von_Wrede
http://www.royaltyguide.nl/families/fam-U-V-W/wrede/wrede-1.htm
https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/BLK%C3%96:Simbschen,_die_Freiherren_von,_Genealogie
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Matzenau