La Praschun tower

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
North side

The tower la Praschun ( praschun - with a long u and emphasized on the second syllable - in the Rhaeto-Romanic idiom Vallader = «prison») stands at the eastern end of the village of Susch in the Lower Engadine in the Swiss canton of Graubünden .

history

Seating niches at a small window on the second floor of the west wall, the remains of a wooden toilet bay next to it and an outwardly protruding oven resting on wooden beams point to the former habitability of the tower, which is considered a good example of a village residential tower .

The tower made of quarry stones dates from the 12th or 13th century. It has a square floor plan with a wall length of 7.5 meters. The wall thickness is 1.3 meters on the ground floor and tapers to around 1 meter on the top two floors. Narrow nicks and square windows are still visible on the facades. The large windows on the east and north sides are more recent, as is today's entrance on the south side.

South side with high entrance

The high entrance was on the first floor on the south side; Bar holes indicate a platform in front of it. The low tent roof was covered with wooden shingles until the 1930s, and since then with Eternit panels. Presumably the tower originally had low battlements.

In the 18th century, a paneled dance hall with a dais and a platform for the musicians was set up on the second floor.

As the chronicler Nicolin Sererhard reported, prison cells were built into the tower on the ground floor in post-medieval times, later it served as an ammunition store and from 1849 as a fire station. The tower is owned by the community and is empty today.

Web links

Commons : Turm Praschun  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Prison tower at www.graubuendenkultur.ch

literature

  • Otto P. Clavadetscher, Werner Meyer : The castle book of Graubünden . Zurich 1984, ISBN 3-280-01319-4
  • Fritz Hauswirth: Castles and palaces in Switzerland. Volume 9. Neptun Verlag. Kreuzlingen, 1973

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information board on site

Coordinates: 46 ° 45 '8.3 "  N , 10 ° 5' 0"  E ; CH1903:  eight hundred and two thousand and thirty-seven  /  181308