Lesachtal

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Lesachtal
coat of arms Austria map
Coat of arms of Lesachtal
Lesachtal (Austria)
Lesachtal
Basic data
Country: Austria
State : Carinthia
Political District : Hermagor
License plate : HE
Main town : Liesing
Surface: 190.83 km²
Coordinates : 46 ° 42 '  N , 12 ° 49'  E Coordinates: 46 ° 41 '38 "  N , 12 ° 48' 57"  E
Height : 1043  m above sea level A.
Residents : 1,288 (January 1, 2020)
Population density : 6.7 inhabitants per km²
Postcodes : 9655, 9654, 9653, 9652
Area code : 04716
Community code : 2 03 21
Address of the
municipal administration:
Liesing 29
9653 Liesing
Website: www.lesachtal.gv.at
politics
Mayor : Johann Windbichler ( ÖVP )
Municipal Council : ( 2015 )
(15 members)

9 ÖVP , 5 SPÖ , 1 UBL

9
5
1
A total of 15 seats
Location of Lesachtal in the Hermagor district
Dellach (Gailtal) Gitschtal Hermagor-Pressegger See Kirchbach Kötschach-Mauthen Lesachtal Sankt Stefan im Gailtal Bezirk Villach-Land Bezirk Spittal an der Drau KärntenLocation of the municipality of Lesachtal in the Hermagor district (clickable map)
About this picture
Template: Infobox municipality in Austria / maintenance / site plan image map
Source: Municipal data from Statistics Austria

BW

Lesachtal ( Slov. Lesna dolina ) is a municipality with 1288 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2020) in Carinthia . With the villages of Liesing , Maria Luggau , St. Jakob , Birnbaum and St. Lorenzen, it comprises the western two thirds of the Carinthian Lesach Valley between the Tyrolean border and Kötschach-Mauthen .

The eastern part of the valley with the village of St. Jakob belongs to the municipality of Kötschach-Mauthen . Both communities are in the political district of Hermagor in the Austrian state of Carinthia .

geography

The Lesach valley extends for a little more than 20 kilometers in a west-east direction parallel to the Italian border. The valley floor rises from 800  m to around 1200  m above sea level. A. at. The highest point in the municipality is the Hohe Warte with a height of 2780  m above sea level. A. In contrast to the rest of the Gailtal , the river has formed a narrow gorge up to 200 meters deep. The sparsely populated settlement area is mainly on the plains north above the gorge. The Gailtal Straße (B 111) runs high above today's narrow valley floor on the northern slope of the valley, where the larger towns are also located.

The Lesachtal is bordered in the north by the Gailtal Alps and the foothills of the Lienz Dolomites , in the south by the Carnic Alps , on whose main ridge the state border with Italy runs.

Lumkofel above Liesing

Community structure

The municipality of Lesachtal is divided into the four cadastral municipalities Kornat, Liesing, Luggau and St. Lorenzen in the Lesachtal.

The municipal area includes the following 31 localities (population in brackets as of January 1, 2020):

  • Assing (4)
  • Pear tree (58)
  • Durnthal (8)
  • Egg (14)
  • Frohn (26)
  • Guggenberg (20)
  • Klebas (106)
  • Kornat (69)
  • Ladstatt (16)
  • Liesing (108)
  • Maria Luggau (178)
  • Mattling (18)
  • Moss (14)
  • Niedergail (30)
  • Nostra (31)
  • Obergail (58)
  • Top ring (25)
  • Pallas (14)
  • Promeggen (14)
  • Rough (21)
  • Beet (9)
  • Salach (2)
  • St. Lorenzen im Lesachtal (287)
  • Stabenthein (10)
  • Sterzen (17)
  • Tiefenbach (9)
  • Cheltsch (36)
  • Tuff bath (5)
  • Meadows (22)
  • Wodmaier (28)
  • Xaveriberg (31)

Other locations are the Rotten Ede , In der Lette , Plasegge and Roßbach .

Neighboring communities

Lavant
Untertilliach Neighboring communities Kötschach-Mauthen

Population development

According to the 2001 census, the municipality of Lesachtal had 1,560 inhabitants, of which 98.4% had Austrian and 1.3% German citizenship . The population has been falling sharply for decades.

In 2001, 98.4% of the population professed the Roman Catholic Church and 1.2% the Evangelical Church.

language

The Lesachtal is linguistically conspicuous, because the spoken German dialect is not Carinthian, but (East) Tyrolean, although there are slight differences. For example, in the East Tyrolean part a boy is called a Buie, on the Carinthian side it is called Pua or Puae, the girls are called Gitsche in Tyrolean, in the Carinthian part they are called Dearn. Slovenian elements have stayed alive as well, if not identified as such.

history

The remote Lesach valley was not settled by Slavs until after AD 600. This gave the valley its name, which is derived from les = forest . As early as 750/800 Bavarian settlers, coming from the west in the direction of the Puster Valley , moved to settle the valley. The influence of the Puster Valley is still visible today in the forms of the court, the dialect and the costume. To this day, elements of the Slovenian language, words and nursery rhymes have been preserved (e.g. potschasn = Slovenian počasi = slow).

Starting from the valley floor, higher and higher areas were cleared and opened up for agriculture. This process was largely completed around 1300 with the creation of Schwaighöfen . The main source of income in the Lesach Valley has always been livestock farming.

The district court of Lesach was transferred to Pittersberg Castle around 1380 and was then only an office of this lordship. This belonged to the Counts of Görz-Tirol , fell to the sovereign after their extinction and was finally, together with Goldenstein, added to the County of Ortenburg .

In the Lesachtal valley, the three municipalities of Luggau, St. Lorenzen and Liesing were initially formed when local churches were formed in 1850. The two cadastral communities Kornat and Strajach were initially attached to the community of Mauthen, but became independent in 1882 as the community of Unterlesach. Another ten years later, both cadastral communities became independent local communities of Birnbaum and St. Jakob. During the Carinthian community reform in 1973, the easternmost community St. Jakob came to Kötschach-Mauthen , while the four western ones were combined to form today's community Lesachtal.

During the First World War , the front line between Austria-Hungary and Italy ran along the crest of the Carnic Alps . Numerous old positions and fortifications still bear witness to the war in the mountains (see: Mountain War 1915–1918 ).

Due to a storm , the valley was completely cut off from the outside world for two days from October 29, 2018, and other days from general road traffic. The state road B111 between St. Lorenzen and Maria Luggau was destroyed over a length of 25 meters. Pioneers of the armed forces helped with the clean-up work and a temporary bypass road was built.

From 20-25 November 2018, a team of spatial planners , 15 students and 3 lecturers, including Isabel Stumfol, the Vienna University of Technology and a journalist visited Lesachtal as part of the experimental course Stories from the Country - Storytelling for Spatial Planning and collected stories from the people on site. A blog was created and, by November 2019, a 104-page magazine about rural life based on 30 stories via crowdfunding .

politics

The municipal council of Lesachtal has 15 members and has been composed as follows since the municipal council election in 2015 :

  • 9 ÖVP
  • 5 SPÖ
  • 1 Lesachtal independent citizen list
mayor
  • until 2015 Franz Guggenberger (SPÖ)
  • since 2015 Johann Windbichler (ÖVP)

coat of arms

The coat of arms and flag were awarded to the community on August 24, 1987 at the instigation of and based on a design by Ignaz Brunner (First Mayor of Lesachtal). The four-part division of the shield alludes to the union of the four independent municipalities of Birnbaum, Liesing, St. Lorenzen im Lesachtal and Maria Luggau until 1973. The four uprooted spruce trees express the valley name, which means forest in Slavonic usage. The alternation of green and silver symbolizes the year-round tourism in the Lesach Valley. The blazon of the coat of arms reads: "Lined with green and silver diagonally turned-four-color, in each field an uprooted, color-turned spruce." The flag is green and white with an incorporated coat of arms.

Culture and sights

Detail of a traditional wooden house on the village square in Liesing
Tuff bath in the Lesach Valley
Folk music academy and fountain on the village square in Liesing

economy

Forestry has played a major role for centuries. The wood of the hazel spruce was often used as tonewood for violin making . Most of it was rafted across the water . Much of the wood was and is still sold to Italy today . The Venetian gondolas in particular are made of wood from the Lesach Valley.

The majority of the working population lives from agriculture and forestry, with the lack of suitable arable land and the difficulty of timber harvesting causing problems. Year-round tourism has been playing an increasingly important role for several decades. Wherever it occurs, it is propagated as "soft tourism". The community of Lesachtal has been part of the Bergsteigerdörfer -Initiative of the PES since 2008 . The Gail in the deeply cut valley is popular with white water sports enthusiasts.

Sons and daughters of the church

Matthias Ritter von Lexer (1830-1892)
  • Matthias Ritter von Lexer (1830–1892), Germanist, lexicographer and university professor in Bavaria, born in Liesing in the Lesachtal
  • Johann Huber (1852–1936), innkeeper, businessman and politician; as "Schwarzer Huber", the first and only Christian Social German MP to the Carinthian state parliament and first mayor of the municipality of Birnbaum
  • Johann Lexer (1904–1980), violin maker, composer, conductor, organist and church choir director
  • Engelbert Obernosterer (* 1936), writer, born in St. Lorenzen in the Lesach Valley.
  • Gerhard Drekonja (* 1939), university professor and Latin America specialist, born in Kornat
  • Gabriel Obernosterer (* 1955), hotelier and politician, member of the National Council and chairman of the ÖVP- Carinthia
  • Melissa Naschenweng (* 1990), musician, folk music and pop singer.

literature

  • Dieter Neumann: The Carinthian Lesachtal. Becoming and changing a mountain farming cultural and economic landscape. Kärntner Landesarchiv, Klagenfurt 1997, ISBN 3-900531-39-0 .
  • Regina Hatheier-Stampfl / Roland Kals / Peter Haßlacher: The Lesach Valley - Excellent Natural, Austrian Alpine Association, Innsbruck 2014, ( online )

Web links

Commons : Lesachtal  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Statistics Austria: Population on January 1st, 2020 by locality (area status on January 1st, 2020) , ( CSV )
  2. ^ Statistics Austria, population census, demographic data. May 15, 2001, accessed March 3, 2019 .
  3. ^ A b Regina Maria Unterguggenberger: At the interface of three cultures. On the Slavic heritage in the dialect of the Carinthian Lesach Valley. Hermagoras Verlag, Klagenfurt / Celovec 2004, ISBN 978-3-7086-0027-7 .
  4. ^ Klaus-Peter Arnold, Carinthia Tourism Region. The major tourist regions of the country, p. 124.
  5. ^ Klaus-Peter Arnold, Carinthia Tourism Region. The major tourist regions of the country, p. 124 f.
  6. Martina Pirker, Leopold Salcher: Lesachtal is cut off from the outside world. In: Small newspaper . October 29, 2018, accessed October 31, 2018 .
  7. Christiane Canori: Almost finished: This is what the new dam in the Gailtal looks like. In: Small newspaper . November 3, 2018, accessed November 6, 2018 .
  8. Federal army advances into the Lesach Valley. In: ORF . October 31, 2018, accessed October 31, 2018 .
  9. Winter fit bypass in the Lesachtal. In: ORF . November 17, 2018, accessed November 19, 2018 .
  10. "Stories from the Land - Storytelling for Spatial Planning" gutelehre.at, Atlas of Good Teaching, 2019 - nominated for the Ars Docendi State Prize for Excellent Teaching 2019 in the category "Learning outcome-oriented examination culture and its anchoring in the course", accessed July 14th 2020.
  11. More than Obergail Blog, from October 2018, accessed July 14, 2020.
  12. More than Obergail - The magazine mehralsobergail.wordpress.com, 104 pages, November 17, 2019, accessed July 14, 2020. - Online issuu.com
  13. Quoted from Wilhelm Deuer: The Carinthian municipal coat of arms . Verlag des Kärntner Landesarchiv, Klagenfurt 2006, ISBN 3-900531-64-1 , p. 170.
  14. Eiko Funada: Bread - Part of Life, with home recipes from the Lesach Valley. Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle 2009, ISBN 978-3-89812-609-0 .
  15. Lesachtaler bread production ( Memento of the original from February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / nationalagentur.unesco.at archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . nationalagentur.unesco.at
  16. Ideas - Deeds - Facts, No. 1: Start conference mountaineering villages in the mountaineering village of Ginzling, from 10-11. July 2008 , Austrian Alpine Association as part of the project “Specific Alpine Convention: Via Alpina and Mountaineering Villages”, Spatial Planning-Nature Conservation Department, Innsbruck 2008, p. 4. PDF download ( Memento of the original from November 8, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) Info: Der Archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed November 7, 2018. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mountainvillages.at