Holidays in Austria: Steyr / Upper Austria

The late Gothic civic houses are a particularly prominent feature of the iron town of Steyr. The stamp artist Adolf Tuma has drawn two of them in a somewhat stylised manner as a means of showing how beautiful they actually are. The most famous of these buildings, the highly ornamented Bummerlhaus, was the subject of a 1953 commemorative in the series on the reconstruction of the Protestant School at Vienna's Karlsplatz. The brisk trade relationships with Germany meant that Steyr was particularly open to Protestantism. In the Counterreformation, Steyr lost all its knife-makers when they went to Solingen to develop the now famous knife industry.
The name "Bummerlhaus" derives from a tavern sign showing a lion that look more like a fat dog and was given the name "Bummerl" (deriving from "pummelig", chubby, Austrian German making hardly any difference between a "p" and a "b").

The characteristic houses of the town centre of Steyr are mostly three-storey with an arcaded courtyard that occasionally also extends over two plots of land for more light. On the road side, they almost always have a baroque or rococo façade. Steyr is particularly fortunate in that, despite the at times very frenzied development of its industry, despite a major fire in 1727 and despite the many bombs that fell on the town in the last war - all of which could have triggered the desire to redevelop the town - particular attention has always been paidd to maintaining the traditional appearance of the town.

Holidays in Austria: Bodensee / Vorarlberg

Austria, with 38 km2 of water and a shoreline of 27 km, has a very small share of the 571.5 km2 area of Lake Constance; in addition, the Fussach bay silts up rather quickly with the deposits from the Rhine, a consequence of the regulation of the estuary in 1906 and 1923. In this relatively clean lake in the foothills of the Alps, often referred to as the "Swabian Sea", there are a remarkable 35 species of fish such as perch, pike and eel. The "Lake Constance Conference" was established in 1972 and comprises the surrounding regions of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria, the Swiss cantons of Schaffhausen, St. Gallen and Thurgau and the Austrian province of Vorarlberg. Its functions include cross-border cooperation in the field of conservation and the prevention of water pollution, which is of major of health and economic importance with regard to tourism and the water supply to the hinterland.

The new definitive by Adolf Tuma shows a particularly impressive perspective of the luxury paddle steamer "Hohentwiel" built by the Swiss shipyard Escher Wyss & Cie from 1911 to 1913 and restored in the years 1984-90 by the "International Lake Constance Navigation Museum" association. With its 950 HP and a top speed of 31 km/h, the ship is still today the fastest on Lake Constance and is a popular tourist attraction thanks to its Art Nouveau furnishings.

Holidays in Austria: Farmhouse in Rossegg / Styria

With the exception of open-air museums, very little has survived of the original peasant architecture. Its replacement proceeded in three stages. First of all in the late middle ages, then at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries, along with the Industrial Revolution, when a switch was made from leaving fields fallow to using fertilisation and from the sickle to the scythe, while new crops and barn feeding increased productivity and somewhat improved the frequently miserable living conditions. This led to farms becoming larger and changing in form. The third and largest period of building activity took place after 1955 with the introduction of modern agriculture with its tractors and machinery and cultivation on a scientific basis.

Wooden buildings were replaced by stone, the living parlours became lighter, airier, more spacious and healthier, the windows larger, while the "smoke parlours" for smoking ham etc. became smoke kitchens, subsequently replaced by smokeless kitchens with energy-saving stoves, the thatched roofs were replaced by tiles, straw and mud walls replaced by brick. The soft plaster limewashed skin was temporarily replaced by cement rendering.

Log buildings and stone houses can be found in West Styria. The residential buildings are often extended by means of a parlour at right angles to the main wing, covered by steep roofs with protruding gables, under which there is a "Gangl" (open corridor).

Holidays in Austria: Press House of Eisenberg / Burgenland

In southern Burgenland, 23 km southeast of Oberwart, close to the Hungarian border, at the foot of the vineyard bearing the same name, nestles Eisenberg, a village with a population of 400. As early as 1500 BC there was a settlement here, as can be concluded by findings of fragments, a clay spoon and pieces of serpentine. In 1931 two ancient melting workshops were discovered. Bronze coins and a belt-buckle have been preserved from Roman times. Since the first documented mention in the 12th century, the place has had several names, such as "PRAEDIUM CHEGGE", "CHEYHKE", "Villa Cheyka", then, as a settlement for Hungarian border guards "Csajka", later "Csake", which became the German "Schauka". In 1930 the Provincial Government renamed the village as "Eisenberg an der Pinka". The 1971 Local Government Structural Improvement Act made the village part of the municipality of "Deutsch Schützen Eisenberg".

The charming Eisenberg homepage says amongst other things that according to the US wine magazine "WINE SPECTATOR" the Eisenberg red wine "PERWOLFF 2000" was awarded 93 points out of a possible 100, the highest number of points ever awarded to an Austrian red wine. The white wine variety Furmint was cultivated here, but was abandoned in favour of the production of successful red wine varieties following the phylloxera disaster. Of interest is that grave furnishings indicate that, surprisingly, black grapes were grown here as early as the Iron Age. The stamp shows a typical press house.

Holidays in Austria: Hochosterwitz/ Carinthia

North of Hochosterwitz Castle, the highly visible and most mighty landmark in Carinthia, runs the Seeberg Federal Road No. 82 from St. Veit an der Glan to Brückl and from there southwards toward the Slovenian border on the Seeberg pass. Just north of the Castle, two roads branch off, one to St. Martin in the south and one to Unterbrückendorf in the north. It is precisely at this point (in the district of St. Georgen am Längsee) that stands the 16th century Gothic wayside shrine reproduced by Adolf Tuma on this new stamp.
The shrine is actually rectangular, stands on two mighty octagonal pedestals and bears the following illustrations: St. Martin in the east, St. Christopher in the south, symbolic characters (probably much later and generally mysterious) in the west and a Pieta in the north.

Wayside shrines at crossroads, heights, along pilgrimage routes or at the middles or ends of towns are often associated with particular events and miracles, or occasionally with saints with a relationship to the place name, such as St. Martin here. Unlike the wayside crucifixes, they are rarely a reminder of accidents. Particularly in Carinthia, there is a large number of stone wayside shrines with particularly rich painting and decorations, almost always protected by a steep and often round protruding tent roof.