Hallstatt made my top ten list on my 2005 trip. 20 years later the charm has been eroded by tourism, but let’s appreciate it for what it was:
Hallstatt is 1500 feet up in the Alps, southeast of Salzburg. The tiny town (over 1000 years old) has been a vacation spot for Austrian royalty for the last 500 years. It’s nestled at the edge of the Hallstatter See, surrounded by mountains, and is reached by ferry. Elese and I spent the first day climbing up to the salt mines above the town, strolling the main (and only) street, and enjoying the local beer at a small bar under a large umbrella (aptly named the umbrella bar). Tourism appears to pick up in June – the town was nearly empty, with only a handful of foreigners.
We rented bikes on Tuesday (or rather were given a set for free at a local hotel) and pedalled around the lake to Obertraun, a slightly larger town known for its snow caves. The scenery is breathtaking – snow capped mountains, fields of wildflowers, lush greenery everywhere you look. We detoured through the mountains on a hiking trail that overlooked the entire valley.
Hallstatt has a small, 12-century chapel that holds the leg bones and skulls of roughly 1200 local inhabitants. The skulls are beautifully painted with flowers and leaves, each labeled with the date of death and the person’s name. It sounds a bit macabre, but really wasn’t – the overall feeling is one of realism about death, respect, and even love for the people that were placed there. The whole skull thing came about as a practicality – the graveyard was too small to accommodate new bodies. After twelve years, you were dug up and added to the collection in the chapel. These days (the population is much smaller), you need to specifically request in your will to be placed there.
Today’s version has a lot of additional construction around the outskirts of town, and literally thousands of tourists a day (more on this subject in this NY Times article). I’d honestly skip it, or just repeat that boat ride mentioned above and appreciate the beauty of the lake.
St. Wolfgang in the Salzkammergut
St. Wolfgang, today, appears to be a popular summer destination, with lakeside hotels, very cheerfully Austrian style, and a church that was more interesting than we expected – worth a stop. For our Christmas time brief stop, the crowds were quite low.
**St. Wolfgang Kirche is a large 15th-century church (built on older churches, I believe) containing a triptych altar by Michael Pacher (c. 1435-1498). Critics have ranked it with the famous altar by Jan van Eyck in the cathedral at Ghent as one of the finest surviving examples of Gothic wood carving. The entire interior is impressive, dark and ornate, but in a decidedly non-gothic way.
