Chalk fire

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Chalk fire (from Latin quiritare , to shout, to call for help, Spanish / Portuguese gritar , Italian gridare , English to cry , French crier to shout), sometimes also chalk fire , are warning lights that were used in the late Middle Ages and early modern times to denote the To signal the approach of dangers. The individual stations were exposed castles or mountain peaks. Two piles of wood were always available at each location, one with dry and one with moist wood. When a message had to be passed on, the moist pile of wood was ignited during the day ( transmission of the message through the rising smoke ), and the dry one at night (transmission through the firelight). Such a designation of fire signals as kraiden is already documented in the Habsburg regional court order of Gries - Bozen from 1487.

Large systems of chalk fires were used in southeastern Austria at the time of the Turkish invasions . Among others, the following castles were locations for this message system:

Chalk fires were also used locally to alert or mobilize the population. A signal tower from Hocheppan Castle in South Tyrol is called the Kreidenturm .

Today the name Kreidfeuer is used by the Austrian Armed Forces for the real-time aerial image system, which records the current state of the Austrian airspace with the help of the Goldhaube radar system . Furthermore, the name is used for the series of militia exercises of the Jägerbataillon Steiermark - Archduke Johann .

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Etymology. In: Online Etymology Dictionary
  2. ↑ chalk. In: Jacob Grimm , Wilhelm Grimm (Hrsg.): German dictionary . tape 11 : K - (V). S. Hirzel, Leipzig 1873 ( woerterbuchnetz.de ).
  3. ^ Hannes Obermair : Bozen Süd - Bolzano Nord. Written form and documentary tradition of the city of Bozen up to 1500 . tape 2 . City of Bozen, Bozen 2008, ISBN 978-88-901870-1-8 , p. 191-192, no. 1230 .
  4. ↑ Kreidfeuer 2010 - The Styrian Hunter Battalion is practicing. September 28, 2010, accessed April 3, 2012 .