We spent the last two days touring the Northern Tyrol area. There is so much to report that I’ll have to figure out what to leave out. It would take too much time to tell about it all! On Saturday, we went to look at the ruins of Rottenburg Castle. This is where 71 Hutterites met their death in the early years of the church. It’s only a short distance from Linde Lederer’s house, it would be a nice long walk to get there. While we were there, the idea came up to have a plaque made with all the names of the Hutterites who died there, and add it to the plaques that are already there. There is not much left of the castle, but there is still enough left to give us an idea of what it must have been like.

After that we went to Lederer’s house to have dinner and then off to Brixlegg. All of these places are so close to one another, one village runs into the next, you don’t even know when you left one village and entered another. In Brixlegg, she showed us a few houses that Hutterites had owned before they were either killed or escaped from Tyrol. We were quite fortunate to run into Wolfgang Rebitsch, we met him as he was walking down the street. He was very interested in Hutterite history and knew a lot about the Hutterite houses in the area. You can hear him in the audio clip attached. There was also a canal running through there; he said that there were three mills in that place that were run by the Hutterites, all of them are long since gone. There are no Hutterite names in that area because they either left or were killed, and the ones that were left behind changed their names so that they wouldn’t be identified with the ‘wiedertaufer’. Click here for audio clip (171KB, 0:34, mp3)

After that we went to visit a nice family near Kramstech. They have two daughters, the 8 year old played the violin for us. She played very well for someone so young, as you can hear in the audio clip attached. We really enjoyed it! We sat around and visited with them for about an hour before going home for supper. We’ve learned a lot from visiting with so many differant people, and also the people are so friendly. They’re not afraid to go out of their way to make us welcome in their homes. Click here for audio clip (139KB, 0:27, mp3)