Wallfahrtskirche der hl. Katharina

The pilgrimage church of Saint Catherine stands on the 578-metre Katharinakogel in the Jauntal valley, near Feistritz ob Bleiburg in Carinthia. It crowns a hill north of St Michael and is protected as a listed monument. The church is reached by a winding road that climbs through beech and spruce woods. The church first appears in records in 1404 as ‘St Catherine on the Hill’. In 1654 the Klagenfurt city priest Jakob Rohrmeister, famed for his many church foundations, endowed a weekly Wednesday mass here. Lightning struck the building in 1796 and it burned to the ground. Reconstruction began only fifty years later and took seven years to complete. In 1858 Bishop Anton Martin Slomšek rededicated the church to Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Inside, the church mixes Gothic, Baroque and Classical details. A four-storey south tower with a domed roof rises above the nave. The neobaroque high altar shows statues of Saint Catherine, Barbara and Apollonia, with the Virgin Mary above. The church’s greatest treasure is a stone statue of Saint Catherine carved in the late 14th century. A neobaroque altar to Saint Rosalia bears slowenian inscriptions dated 1860, and a cross altar displays a crucifix flanked by figures of Mary and John. On the third side altar stands a Madonna flanked by Saint Dominic and Saint Maria Magdalena Pacis holding a heart. In front of the high altar hangs a large Gothic eternal lamp.