Culture & History in Heiligenblut am Großglockner

The emperor’s daughter is also horrified. She asks Briccius to take the holy relic with the blood of Christ with him – in his homeland it would certainly be in better Christian hands. But Briccius gets lost in the Hohe Tauern. He gets caught in the storm and is killed.
In the spring, farmers find the dead man and recognize in him a saint. With the Holy Blood
the name of our village was also found.

The names of all those who lost their lives in our mountains are written in the “Iron Book”. For two centuries. Even then, intrepid farmers’ sons were willing to accompany scientists and mountaineers on often daring tours.

A new task, a new trade was born. As “mountain guides of Heiligenblut” they brought the entrusted safely to their destination and earned a legendary reputation in this way. The prerequisites were experience and local knowledge, knowledge of the necessary equipment and, above all, the ability to respond to the people being cared for.

Already in the 11th century the Pallavicinis belonged to the Italian nobility. In 1731 Gianluca Pallavicini came to Vienna as a diplomatic representative of Genoa, and since then he had a close relationship with the imperial court. Alfred von Pallavicini also served the emperor as an officer. His mother was a countess of Erdödy.

Pallavicini is considered one of the best mountaineers of his time. On August 18, 1876, the Margrave – accompanied by the Heiligenblut mountain guides Tribusser, Kramser and Bäuerle – conquered the “Pallavicini Gully” named after him.

The gully is still feared today because of the falling rocks. On June 26, 1886, Pallavicini was killed during a tour of the Glockner.

For a long time, big names shaped the image of Austria’s winter – with lifts in vast ski areas. Heiligenblut am Großglockner learned about it during hibernation. Only a few could imagine that Heiligenblut could also become “winter-ready” one day.
With Josef Schmidl and the first ropeway projects, the beginning and the turning point came in 1964. Other timely decisions followed – far-sighted and, above all, infrastructurally necessary projects. The diligence was developed, the single-cable gondola was built on the Schareck. It remains to be seen whether the time has come to try something new again.

Civil engineer Franz Wallack, planner and builder of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, calculated the cost of this project in 1930 at 85.8 million euros (monetary value 2016). In 1936, Wallack presented the final account: 85.1 million euros – 700,000 euros less than estimated. The leitmotif of the technician and experienced high alpinist Wallack in an ecologically not yet sensitive time:

“The Glockner Road must technically outshine all famous alpine roads and be suitable for large-scale traffic. It must fit harmoniously into the landscape, because in this sublime mountain world it would be presumptuous to try to outdo nature with the means of technology.”

That is why Wallack also had the vegetation lifted off the construction site so that it could be used to heal construction wounds afterwards. And he established “planting gardens” to grow alpine seeds appropriate to the location. Wallack thus built in 1930 / 35 with half a century ahead of time the ideal feeder road of the Hohe Tauern National Park, which was founded in 1981 / 83.

Wallack was also ahead of his time as a traffic engineer: he wired a telephone with 16 emergency call boxes next to his road and developed the “rotary plow,” which coped with masses of snow in the high mountains and is used around the world today.

Wallack was the first to lead his high alpine road not up to the glaciers, but high above them. Therefore, by 2015, as many as 64 million visitors experienced the overview of the Pasterze, Austria’s largest glacier. Thus, together with Schönbrunn Palace and Hohensalzburg Fortress, this high alpine road forms the top trio of Austria’s tourist attractions.

In 1980, the Austrian architectural pope Friedrich Achleitner applied to Wallack’s work the standard of an ecologically highly sensitive time: “Proof that economic interests and technical understanding need not destroy a landscape.” Wallack took stock in 1960 on the 25th anniversary of his road: “Forgotten will be the many thousands of workers and engineers who worked tirelessly here. But one thing will remain: The road.” Perhaps forgotten – but thanked remain all who built this road.

During the construction of the Glockner Road from 1930 to 1935, an average of between 2000 and 3000 people found work. The modest weekly wages of 230 euros for 48 hours of work were in line with the collective agreements of the construction industry. At that time, a kilo of brown bread cost 1.90, half a beer 1.52, a haircut 6 euros and a roll 22 cents. However, the wages were supplemented by bonuses: Depending on the level of the job, up to 12 percent and 25 percent each for overtime and work on Sundays.

155 people from Klagenfurt founded a section of the Alpine Club in 1872, also with the ambitious goal of significantly facilitating Carinthian access to the Großglockner. The club’s own civil engineer Heinrich Pierl developed a concrete plan for this: “2500 meters of ascent from Heiligenblut to the Glockner cannot be accomplished in one day there and back. But halfway up there would be a level place for a hut. Heiligenblut already offered 111 guest beds in three good hostels. Nothing can go wrong. And so we started the construction of the Glocknerhaus as early as 1874.”

The construction of such a hut with 40 beds, accessible from Heiligenblut only on a narrow path in three hours, weighed heavily on the association’s budget. Therefore, the resourceful people of Klagenfurt organized a lottery that brought in two-thirds of the construction costs of 176,000 euros (monetary value 2016).

Above all, however, the construction of the railroad in 1875 through the Drau Valley and the Pinzgau region of the Glockner Group opened up the tourist potential of large cities such as Munich or Vienna. The people of Klagenfurt therefore planned to improve the ascent from Heiligenblut to the Glocknerhaus in the long term. They raised 2.7 million euros and built an 11.2 km long and 2.5 m wide “Glockner Road” from 1900 to 1908 according to Heinrich Pierl’s plans, so that tourists could even comfortably ascend in two-horse carriages. From 1927 onwards, ten-seater post buses were already running between Heiligenblut and Glocknerhaus.

Heinrich Pierl had a daring idea at the time: a road on the blown tracks of an almost 3000 year old trade route over the Hochtor. It was to open up an attractive tourist approach to the Großglockner. In 1895 Pierl designed a route, but the plan never got off the drawing board due to lack of funds. Only Franz Wallack took up this project again in 1924 under completely different circumstances and led to success.

For some ideas, the time seems to be ripe only after long years. Alberth Wirth ceded the entire Glockner area to the Austrian Alpine Association in 1918 – in 1981 the Hohe Tauern National Park was founded.