Hainburger gate
The Hainburger gate or (especially in Slovakia) the Theben gate ( Slovak : Devínska brána ) and currently also Bratislava / Pressburger gate ( Slovak : Bratislavská brána ), formerly the Hungarian gate (lat. Porta Hungarica ), is a short breakthrough valley of the Danube near Hainburg and Bratislava (Pressburg), between the Hundsheimer Berg ( 480 m above sea level ) in Austria and the Devínska Kobyla (Thebener Kogel, 514 m nm ) in Slovakia .
Location and landscape
Coming from the Alps and the Danube floodplains through Vienna and Lower Austria , the river bed narrows to around 200 meters and flows at the foot of the Hundsheimer and Hainburger mountains (steep slope of the Hundsheimer Berg) in a right curve on the steep slope of the Devínske Karpaty (Thebener / Devín Carpathians) ) over to the plain of Bratislava . The historical landmarks of the left bank of the Danube are Thebes Castle in Devín (now part of Bratislava) or the Pressburg Castle .
Between Hundsheimer and Thebner Kogel, the March - coming from Moravia and the Marchfeld - flows into the Danube at Devín. The two rivers form the border between Austria and Slovakia . It runs in the river area of the Danube from east to west and runs northwards from the mouth of the March. To the south of the gate, the Danube is Slovak on both sides ( Rusovce / Karlburg , now part of Bratislava V ), the three-state corner is 5 kilometers from the Danube. Even after that, the Slovak-Hungarian border runs on the right bank.
The mountains near Bratislava belong to the Little Carpathians , the south-western tip of the Carpathian Mountains ( Inner Western Carpathians ). The Hainburg Mountains are orographically calculated according to the course of the Danube to the Eastern Alps , from the rock they are part of the Carpathian Mountains, the transition between these two mountains is represented by the Leithagebirge southwest, so that the Hundsheimer Mountains can be viewed as a Carpathian group. Both mountains are geologically linked here in one zone, corresponding to the cliff zone of the Weinviertel as a connection to the Outer Carpathian Arch. The Prellenkirchner Flur and Parndorfer Platte in Burgenland , an old breakthrough of the Danube, today the Leitha lower reaches, extend towards the Leitha Mountains. This Bruck Gate is much flatter, but it represents the actual transition from the Vienna Basin to the Little Hungarian Plain (Kisalföld in Hungarian).
The gate landscape of the Hainburger Pforte thus forms the local connection between the Alpine and Carpathian regions. The Vienna Basin belongs to the Pannonian Basin , i.e. the Eastern Alpine Foreland , but is also part of the Alpine-Carpathian Foreland , and is embedded between the Hainburger Pforte and Wiener Pforte at Korneuburg / Klosterneuburg within the Alpine-Carpathian chains. The area of the Hainburger Pforte forms a double geomorphological transition zone. It therefore also represents a climatic transition between the Alpine-Mediterranean and continental climates.
History and culture
The amount of electricity is located near the border triangle Austria-Slovakia-Hungary and has always been an important traffic junction . Here the route along the Danube - the dominant river of Central Europe - crosses with the old Amber Road , which connects the Mediterranean with Northern Europe.
The Hainburger Pforte already had strategic importance in Roman times ( Fort Gerulata ) and the subsequent migrations , where it was guarded by the various powers. There was already a hill fort on Braunsberg under the Celts . In the Middle Ages, the fortified town of Hainburg and the castle towering over it, as well as Devín Castle, served as the line of defense.
In this region steeped in history , numerous fights have taken place since the Stone Age, in addition to peaceful population movements, including the Battle of Pressburg in 907 , in which the Bavarian ban was almost completely destroyed by the Hungarians, and - about 20 km north at Dürnkrut-Jedenspeigen - the decisive battle between the troops of King Přemysl Otakar of Bohemia and the newly elected Roman-German King Rudolf I of Habsburg .
From a cultural point of view, Hainburger and Brucker Pforte have been the border between German and Hungarian language areas since then, with German and Croatian mixed settlement towards Hungary and German-Slovak settlement north of the Danube. Slovakia only became independent from Hungary after the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 (until 1993 as part of Czechoslovakia ), the former German West Hungary only came to Austria as Burgenland in 1921. This meant that the Iron Curtain was still running here during the Cold War .
It was not until the EU was enlarged to the east in 2004 that the Hainburger Pforte became an area of free passage again; in the meantime it is not only a core element of the Centrope European region (Vienna-Bratislava with Hungarian participation), but also once again a hub for transcontinental long-distance traffic with the West -East axis of Western Europe in the Black Sea area with connection to the Balkans , and increasingly also one of the north-south axes from the Baltic Sea area to the Upper Adriatic , according to the ancient importance.
An architectural symbol of the Hainburger Pforte is the Wienertor of the city of Hainburg, which represented a traffic bottleneck, especially until the opening of the north-east A6 motorway . The permanent exhibition located there is entitled Das Wienertor zu Hainburg an der Donau .
- The Hainburger (Theben) gate around 1873 (record sheets of the state survey )
Individual evidence
Coordinates: 48 ° 10 ′ 30 ″ N , 16 ° 58 ′ 43 ″ E