Maria Waitschach

Maria Waitschach stands high above the Guttaring valley on a wooded hill at 1,134 metres. The parish and pilgrimage church overlooks the scattered hamlets of Waitschach, Guttaring and Hüttenberg across winding mountain roads. Its position once made it a lookout and refuge during the Turkish raids of the 15th century. The surviving walls and buttresses still show the old defensive line. The church was first recorded in 1390 as a filial of Guttaring, though a carved stone basin outside suggests an earlier sacred site. The late-Gothic hall church was begun in 1447 and completed with a slender octagonal turret rising from the roof. Inside, ribbed vaults form intricate star and net patterns over the five-bay nave. The high altar is one of Austria’s oldest Baroque works, housing a crowned Madonna flanked by Joachim and Anna. A Gothic sacrament house and a 1626 landscape altar add to the furnishings, while a vivid Last Judgement covers the south wall. Beside the church stands a small Gothic charnel house from 1535. Its interior walls carry faded frescoes, and the outside retains traces of a painted sundial. The whole ensemble is reached by quiet country lanes that climb through beech and spruce forests. From the hilltop the view stretches across the surrounding ridges to the Karawanken range on clear days.