Climb up
Oberstieg is a French town in the Vosges , since 1794 a district of Engenthal and since October 1974 a district of Wangenbourg-Engenthal in the canton of Wasselonne in the Bas-Rhin department in the Grand Est region (until 2015 Alsace ). It lies on the linguistic border from Upper Rhine-Manish to Rhine-Franconian .
Location and traffic
The small town, once called Steiga because of the steeply uphill road from Romanswiller to Dabo , is located in the sandstone Vosges at an altitude of 475 m, below the Schneeberg (961 m) and Großer Rosskopf (811 m) mountains . It is located twelve kilometers south of Zabern and ten kilometers west of Wasselonne, on the border with Lorraine , which runs about three kilometers further northwest on the Col de Valsberg (652 m). The road from Wasselonne to Dabo and Sarrebourg (D 143 in Alsace, D 45 in Lorraine) leads through the village .
history
The place arose around the small monastery Oberstieg , founded in the 12th century , whose hospice was supposed to take care of pilgrims on their way across the Vosges. The convent flourished and in the 13th century built a monastery church in Zabern, where it had received land for a larger settlement, which is now the parish church “ Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité ”. In 1303 most of the monks moved to Zabern and the convent, Steiga inferior (Unterstieg), was relocated there. Oberstieg lost its status as a monastery and became the Steiga superior priory . From the now motherhouse in Zabern, brothers were sent to the hospice in Oberstieg to take care of it. The monastery in Zabern became the main house of the small order of the Steigerherren ("Ordo Steigensium"), a branch of the Augustinian canons , which was dissolved by Pope Sixtus IV on June 17, 1482 after the moral and economic decline in the 15th century . His property was intended for the pens of regulated Augustinian canons.
In 1487 Dominicans of the observance movement, who had to leave the Klingental monastery in Kleinbasel as early as 1482 after only a short stay and had initially found refuge in Rentingen near Sarrebourg , came to Oberstieg . There they were too remote in the inhospitable area, and in 1507 they left the place again. The Strasbourg bishop Wilhelm von Hohnstein then sent some Augustinian canons from Ittenwiller there, but they too left again in 1512. The bishop moved in and gave it to the Augustinian canons monastery of Notre-Dame in Zabern in 1541.
Today Oberstieg is a branch of the Wangenbourg parish.
On November 21, 1944, Oberstieg was the first place in Alsace to be liberated by German occupiers when a battalion of the French 2nd Panzer Division under Lieutenant Colonel Jacques Massu occupied the place.
Attractions
The monastery chapel "Sainte-Marie-de-l'Assomption", classified as a Monument historique (historical monument) since 1862 , was probably built immediately after the establishment of the settlement and restored in the 19th century. It consists of a simple ship made of sandstone with three bays , to which a pentagonal broken apse adjoins. The ribbed vault is broken into an ogival arch. The side walls with the small windows are still purely Romanesque , while the cap capitals and the pointed arches inside show the influence of the Gothic . The Romanesque step portal corresponds in its design and its sculptural decoration to the southern transept wing of the Strasbourg cathedral . Since many stonemason's marks are also common, one assumes a common building hut . Of the other monastery buildings, the refectory and the former house of the prior are still preserved.
Web links
Coordinates: 48 ° 38 ′ 29 ″ N , 7 ° 18 ′ 13 ″ E