Holiday in Austria, Part II: Bad Goisern

Photo by Gi., 24/07/09 A view of Bad Goisern from the Ewige Wand. Right-click on the photo and "view image" to see it in (much) greater detail. The churches I describe below are both near the backwards L-shaped building with the turquoise roof.


Bad Goisern is a town at the tip of the Hallstätter Lake, the trim houses flocking along a valley through which an idyllic creek flows, a railroad track leads, and a road runs to Bad Ischl and beyond. A mound of mountains culminating in the Predigstuhl (1278 m) rises to the far side of the road. It is predominantly covered in forest that is a mixture of leafy and needle trees, but there are also beautiful sloped pastures and stately wooden houses in cheerful white and chocolate brown, which look like something straight out of Heidi. Bared at the top in a long, rough bluish-grey facade of rock known as the "Ewige Wand" ("eternal wall"). On the other side there is an even more impressive backdrop of mountains, tall and a little somber, which looked on the first day as if they were drawn in grey pastel and smudged with a shade of pine-green so dark as to be nearly black where the evergreen trees tentatively cloak the steep folds. One peak is grassy and sparsely speckled with loose rocks, and it reminded me forcibly of the Scottish Highlands. Surprisingly enough the height of the mountains is not too oppressive and the valley feels, if anything, brightly snug.

There is a market in Bad Goisern, housed in a large circular white tent on the designated marketplace; at least two schools, one of which was evidently constructed in the 1960s; a little museum with a wooden salt barge in front of it; a recreation centre; a public bath; and two churches that I could see. One is a Catholic church, which was mostly built in the 19th century but has been around in one form or another since the Middle Ages, and which while true in its simple way to the Gothic aesthetic, is surrounded by asphalt and isn't that lovely to begin with, though reasonably or not I found the way the red roof was tiled delightful. The other church is a Protestant one, cheerfully painted in yellow and white trim, and surmounted by a black spire; it also has a graveyard beside it, the surprisingly merry type I also encountered last year in Füssen (Bavaria), where the ground is covered in light gravel and the graves are decked out in vivid live and cut flowers — marigolds, begonias, impatiens, roses, lilies of the valley (the blossoms of these were long gone), etc. As far as I remember it originated in 1791, but the oldest gravestones appear to hail from the 1960s. At the entrance there are plaques, one commemorating the victims of an avalanche, and another the ca. 275 men from Bad Goisern who died or went missing in World War II. Two elaborate plaques listed dates and places as well as names with the photos of World War I veterans, of which there were evidently over fifty.

Altogether most of the buildings are older or at least traditional — gingerbread and shutters and all — though the sprawling grocery stores are decidedly modern. As I noticed in Munich last year, the chimneys are fitted out with tiny (and not infrequently adorable) roofs, though in Bad Goisern a boring tendency was to merely affix an inverted curved piece of metal over them. The roof tiles often have hooks on them, and Mama suggested that this might be meant to let the snow slide off better. The windows are mostly diminutive rectangles and the ceilings are not high, presumably to preserve warmth in the winter, but at least in the summer the effect is not depressing.

We stayed in a trim wooden cottage beside the graveyard and the facilities were quite nice. The bed linen was provided, stacked on a chair beside the door of the upper floor where the beds were; so was a combined kitchen and dining room on the ground floor, which was presumably converted from a stable and has thick fieldstone walls; a round table and two chairs greeted us on the balcony, from which torrents of pink and periwinkle and red petunias hung; and a tennis/volleyball court as well as two miniature soccer goals were at our disposal out of doors. From what I could tell, the architecture of the cottage is remarkably sturdy, livable, and complete, though it is very little.

Photo by Me. This is the cottage in which we stayed, and in particular of the fieldstone-walled ground floor where the kitchen and dining room are located. Note how, due to my pathetic photography, the unimportant things are big and the important things are small. (c:

On the first evening we wandered along the creek until we reached the monument to the 19th-century philosopher and one-time village mayor Konrad Deubler. The banks of the watercourse were manicured within an inch of their lives, but I liked it. There were pear trees, a stately house in pale lime green that was overrun by dense vines, ducks, a sloe bush, hostas, etc., and thinking of the bleakness of winter I thought that it was, like the valley as a whole, a welcome oasis in the wilderness.

Altogether the scenery was so harmonious and contented, and so free of disturbing factors at least to me, that I felt entirely at ease. It was good to know that I could go for a walk and there was a chance of not meeting a single other person along the way, and at the same time it was by no means desolate. I liked it, too, that people greet each other in the streets, and it being Austria, "Grüss Gott" was as common as "Guten Morgen," etc. As for the natural environment, it was very much the world of the Romantics, but true and tangible and therefore very much to my taste. It often reminded me of Schubert, especially his Schöne Müllerin ("Ich hört ein Bächlein rauschen," etc.).

At around 8 p.m. I went to sleep, after Uncle Pu (who stayed in the cottage with us) had finally come in his car after being held up by fallen trees near Passau. I woke up again after dark to the sound of rain, as lightning flickered nearly constantly and rolls of thunder resounded now and then through the great bowl of valley and mountain. Even though I am fond of thunderstorms in the abstract, at that altitude the experience toed the line between awe-inspiring and scary. Still, going back to sleep was not difficult.