Gatterholzl

Church at Gatterhölzl

Interior of the church

Gatterhölzl is the name of the Roman Catholic parish of the Church of St. Klemens Maria Hofbauer at Hohenbergstrasse 42 in Vienna - Meidling , which was built from 1955 to 1959 according to plans by Ladislaus Hruska .

history

The church and its surroundings are located on the flat top of the Green Mountain on the district border between Meidling and Hietzing , near the grounds of Schönbrunn Palace . The name Gatterhölzl goes back to the Middle High German word "chatte", which referred to the building of a "small house owner" without any reason. In the Middle Ages there was a dense forest area with a "chatter mill", so that the field name Gatterhölzl became natural for the area . In 1570 the mill disappeared when a hunting lodge called Katterburg was built nearby on the site of today's Schönbrunn Palace . A Meierhof in Gatterhölzl also perished at the end of the 16th century.

Since the forest area was considered dangerous because all sorts of "dodgy rabble" were up to mischief here, and the imperial Schönbrunn Palace was in the immediate vicinity, Emperor Joseph II had the forest partially cleared and cleared. In 1830, the well-known Tivoli amusement facility with a giant slide was built on the Green Mountain , which was converted into a dairy a little later and thus became a popular excursion destination for the Viennese.

Since the middle of the 19th century, the settlement of the area increased and the former forest disappeared. As early as 1901, therefore, the first plans for a church appeared to relieve the Meidling parish church . During the First World War , a war hospital with 39 barracks and an emergency church based on plans by Julius Hirnschrodt was built between the Meidlinger Trainkaserne and Schönbrunn . The church had a dome and was popularly called the "Russian Church" because Russian prisoners of war had helped to build it. It stood on the other side of Hohenbergstrasse, roughly opposite today's church building.

After the war, the entire war hospital including the church was to be demolished. However, the church was saved and rebuilt with two neighboring barracks so that it could be used as a pastoral care station . This Hofbauer-Klementinum also had a kindergarten and event rooms and was increasingly referred to as Gatterhölzl for short by the population. As a result, extensive and beautiful urban residential complexes (including the Am Tivoli settlement ) were built in the spirit of the garden city movement and the population increased sharply. In 1935 the emergency church was elevated to a parish church and handed over to the Capuchin Order for care. This measure can also be seen in connection with the policy of the corporate state to build more churches in workers' residential areas. A church building association was also established because it was already clear then that the existing facilities would not be sufficient in the long term. In 1945 the outbuildings of the church were also destroyed by bombs.

In the post-war period, nature conservation was lifted for the last remnant of the forest in Gatterhölzl and it had to make way for further buildings. According to plans by the architect Ladislaus Hruska , the new church was built from 1955 to 1959 in the area of ​​the former extinguishing water pond , which later led to structural difficulties. After its completion, the old church was demolished and the property built with residential houses.

Successors to the Capuchins in the care of the parish are the Premonstratensians . In 2009 a priory of this order was founded in the parish , which was founded by the Itinga canon of the city of Salvador da Bahia in the Brazilian state of Bahia to support pastoral care in Austria (Itinga, in turn, was founded from the Geras monastery). Four Premonstratensians formed the first convention.

Church building

The church is a modern, round building reminiscent of Orthodox churches, crowned with a dome and flanked by two bell towers. The building materials are concrete and bricks. In the middle of the interior there is an altar made of green Bolzano marble. In the dome is St. Trinity represented with 120 saints. Colored glass windows by Heinrich Tahedl have a major impact on the overall impression. On the walls there is a large crucifix and wood-carved pictures of the Stations of the Cross by Josef Papst .

The lower church contains a burial place for the Capuchins.

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Moldavian cross and bust of Prince Șerban I. Cantacuzino

In the immediate vicinity of the church, approximately at the location of the old emergency church, in the middle of the community settlement Am Tivoli , the Moldavian cross, which the Wallachian prince Șerban I Cantacuzino had erected, has been located since the time of the second Turkish siege in 1683 . He had taken part in the Turkish siege with an auxiliary army and then buried the cross in front of the Turks. After the siege, the Viennese found it in the Gatterhölzl and placed it again in a chapel nearby. In 1785, thieves stole the cross, which was then replaced by a copy. The original is now in Geyerau Castle / Dvorec Lisičje near Ljubljana in Slovenia . In 1929 the renovated chapel was put up again, albeit a little offset from Hohenbergstrasse, as residential buildings were being built around it. Badly damaged in the war, it was finally restored true to the original in 1961 and consecrated. In 1983 the Romanian community in Vienna had a bust of Servan Cantacuzenos erected opposite the chapel to mark the three hundredth anniversary of the Turkish siege.

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literature

• Ernst Tschiedel: The Turkish Chapel with the Moldavian Cross. In: sheets of the Meidlinger district museum. Vienna 1982, issue 13.
• Ludwig Varga: The history of the parish Gatterhölzl. In: sheets of the Meidlinger district museum. Vienna 2014, issue 77.

Web links

Commons : Gatterhölzl  - Collection of Images

• Website of the parish Gatterhölzl

Footnotes

1. ^ Gatterhölzler parish news. Summer 2017, p. 5. (accessed August 26, 2017)
2. ↑ Gatterhölzl Premonstratensian Priorat ( memento from April 25, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed August 26, 2017).
3. ↑ Werner T. Bauer: Wiener Friedhofsführer - Exact description of all burial places along with a history of the Viennese burial system

Coordinates: 48 ° 10 ′ 33 ″  N , 16 ° 19 ′ 11 ″  E