Drop gate pillar
A drop gate column is a historical building on the right. If a criminal was arrested in earlier centuries for whose punishment, due to the seriousness of the offense he was accused of, not the local judge but the next higher instance was responsible, the local judge had to hand him over at the drop gate of the defensive wall of the town. If a settlement did not have a defensive wall, a gate column was erected to which the accused was bound until he was evacuated. According to the code of criminal procedure at the time , the district judge had to pick up the accused within a set period, otherwise the local judge would only symbolically tie him up with a blade of grass or twine, thus making his escape possible. Gate pillars are therefore to be seen as an interface between lower and higher jurisdiction . Often were shrines secondarily used as Falltorsäulen, in some cases, their own columns were erected. Such a gate column exists, for example, in Harmannstein in the Lower Austrian Waldviertel in the form of a granite stele with a hole and a chiseled hatchet (right symbol) and cross.
literature
- Franz Hula: The lamps for the dead and wayside shrines in Austria , Vienna 1948