International Wind- and Watermill Museum

The museum site is easily accessed by road; nearby is the intersection between the B 4 and B 188 federal highways.

Horst Wrobel made a replica of the mill at a scale of 1:25 and then collected all kinds of material about windmills and watermills.

In order to create a larger scale model, he first made overtures in 1977 to the district of Gifhorn, who then actively supported the project.

In the same year the two parties concluded a leasehold agreement for the land of the future museum site.

With the aid of bulldozers and flushing dredgers, the terrain was landscaped and numerous ditches and ponds created, as well as a 5 hectare mill lake.

The lake also acts as a retention basin to prevent flooding to and to regulate the flow of the river Ise.

They provide information about those processes that man made use of in employing wind and water power to carry out heavy work before the discovery of the steam engine.

The 40 metre high original was built in 1788, burnt down in 1945 during the final clashes of the Second World War and was rebuilt in Potsdam in 1993.

When the king threatened it with compulsory purchase, the miller was referred to the Kammergericht, or Supreme Court, in Berlin.

The Viktoria post mill comes from the nearby village of Osloß and may therefore be considered typical of the local area.

The district of Gifhorn bought the dilapidated mill in 1977 and gave it into the charge of the museum owner, Horst Wrobel.

According to the Prussian Civil Code of 1794, a Bockwindmühle was not counted as a building in its narrowest sense, but as a machine.

These terms indicated that, in the former case that the mill was built on a small hill, and in the latter, that it had a cellar into which the horses and carts could be driven.

It used to stand by a mountain stream in the Lesachtal valley in East Tyrol and is driven on the museum site by a pond.

In the interior, horses walked around in a circle turning a wooden cogwheel with a power of one horsepower (PS) each.

The replica of a Ukrainian windmill, the Natalka, was opened in 1988 in the presence of the consul general of the Soviet Union, an occasion intended to foster positive contacts with the former Communist state.

The mill's prototype stands in Gifhorn's partner town of Korsun-Shevchenkivskyi in Ukraine near Kyiv, where it acts as a restaurant today under the name of Vitrjak ("windmill").

The mill is a present from the Andrej Rublijow Foundation from Moscow, which is dedicated to the conservation of Russian architectural heritage.

In 1935 the "Society of the Friends of Alphonse Daudet" dedicated the mill as a museum and, in 1936, it appeared on a French postage stamp.

The Muscovite patriarch, Alexy II, formerly head of 100 million Russian Orthodox Christians, opened it in 1995.

In the church there is an exhibition with liturgical artefacts (icons, oil lamps, candlesticks, vestments, embroidery, fonts and bibles) from the Moscow patriarchate.

There is an additional charge for visiting the interior of this impressive, cathedral-like building, decorated with iconic paintings.

The original was built in 1765 as a Transfiguration of Christ Church (Christi-Verklärungskirche) in the central Russian village of Kosljatjewo.