Archaeologists in Saxony-Anhalt found a second stone building next to the palace of a lost royal residence. The site is the Ottonian palatinate of Helfta, on a hill called Kleine Klaus near Lutherstadt Eisleben. Digs there ran from 2020 to 2023 and started up again on August 31, 2026. They’ll wrap up on October 24, 2026.
The state heritage office, led in the field by Prof. Dr. Felix Biermann, manages the work. About 20 volunteers help on site. The town of Eisleben is building tourist facilities around the site, and the state funds that effort.
The earlier digs already turned up the big pieces. Before 969, Emperor Otto the Great founded the Radegund church here. A stone palace from the same period served as the royal hall and residence. Teams also found strong walls around the main fort and its outer yards, plus pit houses, lime kilns and grain-drying ovens. Graves from the Carolingian period came out of the ground too.
The new building sits beside the palace. Finds date it firmly to the 10th century, which makes it one of the earliest secular stone buildings in Helfta and in all of Saxony-Anhalt. It measures about 9 by 5 meters and has a cellar. Its entry stairs survive in good shape. Nobody knows yet what it was for. Researchers see two options: a guest house for noble companions of the king, or the seat of a count who ran the place while the ruler was away.
A stone-lined terrace also came to light on the east side of the palace. It faces the courtyard between palace and church. It likely worked as a platform for open-air gatherings. Church, palace and the new building formed a stone group you could see from far away. In the 10th century, that showed what the king could build and what power he held.
Life looked very different in the southeast outer yard. Crews uncovered more pit houses there, mostly rectangular and three to five meters on a side. They had walls of woven branches and clay, roofs of wood or reed, and a hearth lined with stones. Ordinary people lived and worked in them. Clay loom weights, casting crucibles and a lime kiln show what they made: textiles, lime for plaster and mortar, and objects of copper alloys. Walls and ditches split this world from the royal one, and the finds show a gap in living standards too.
A later castle stood on the same hill. The Hackeborn family built it in the 12th century, after the settlement had already lost much of its weight. It was far smaller than the earlier fortresses. Its oval main castle measured about 50 meters across and had a ditch. A slightly larger outer yard lay beside it. Diggers found the rectangular keep in 2023. This season they work in the courtyard around it. Foundations of the oval defensive wall survive, along with cellars, thresholds of timber-frame houses and a larger palace-like building. All of it points to a sturdy, well-defended noble castle. Today nothing of it shows above ground.
The season also brought up many graves from the church cemetery, plus wall remains and ditches from repeated rebuilding of the hill. Post holes from a palisade even date back to the pre-Roman Iron Age. Teams also examined a second underground tunnel from the late Middle Ages, called an Erdstall.
The small finds are rich. Silver coins span the 10th to 15th centuries. Ottonian jewelry includes earrings and enameled cloak clasps, one of them a rare crescent shape. Other finds are iron arrowheads, lots of pottery with typical Slavic wave patterns, a nearly playable bone flute, and a piece of an antler box decorated with ring-and-dot marks from around the year 1000. Together they show a hill with war, royal display and busy daily trade across many centuries.