Following the road again, Volders is reached at about a mile from Wattens. As at the latter place, your ears are liberally greeted with the sounds of the smithy. Volders has quite a celebrity for its production of scythes; some ten or twelve thousand are said to be exported annually. The Post Inn affords tolerable quarters for a night or two while exploring the neighbourhood.
The prolific pencil of Schöpf has provided the church with an altar-piece of the Holy Family; though an ancient foundation, it does not present any object of special interest.
The Voldererthal runs beneath some peaks dear to Alpine climbers, the Grafmarterspitz, the Glunggeser, the Kreuzjoch, and the Pfunerjoch. Its entrance is commanded by the castles of Hanzenheim, sometimes called Starkelberg, from having belonged to a family of that name, and used as a hospital during the campaign of 1809; and Friedberg, which is still inhabited, having been carefully restored by the present owner, Count Albert von Cristalnigg. It was originally built in the ninth or tenth century, as a tower to guard the bridge; it gave its name to a powerful family, who are often mentioned in the history of Tirol. At the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries, it was one of the castles annexed by Friedrich mit der leeren Tasche. It contains also the Voldererbad, a mineral spring, which is much visited, but more conveniently reached by way of Windegg than through the valley itself.
In the Voldererwald is a group of houses, Aschbach by name, which belongs ecclesiastically to the parish of Mils, on the opposite side; and the following story is given to account for the anomaly:—At the time when the territory of Volders belonged parochially to Kolsass (it must have been before the year 1630, as it was that year formed into an independent parish), the neighbourhood was once ravaged by the plague. A farmer of Aschbach being stricken by it, sent to beg the spiritual assistance of the priest of Kolsass. The priest attended to the summons; but when he reached the threshold of the infected dwelling, and saw what a pitiable sight the sick man presented, his fears got the better of his resolution, and he could not prevail on himself to enter the room. Not to leave his penitent entirely without comfort, however, he exhorted him to repentance, heard his confession, and absolved him from where he stood; and then uncovering the sacred Host, bid him gaze on it in a spirit of faith, and assured him he should thereby receive all the benefit of actual Communion. The visit thus completed, he hurried back to Kolsass in all speed. Meantime the sick man, not satisfied with the office thus performed, sent for the priest of Mils, who, supported by apostolic charity, approached him without hesitation, and administered the sacred mysteries. Contrary to all expectation, the farmer recovered, resumed his usual labours, and in due course garnered his harvest. In due course also came round the season for paying his tithe. With commendable punctuality the farmer loaded his waggon with the sacred tribute, and started alacritously on the way to Kolsass. Any one who watched him might have observed a twinkle of his eye, which portended some unusual dénouement to the yearly journey. As he approached Kolsass the twinkle kindled more humorously, and the oxen felt the goad applied more vigorously. The pastor of Kolsass turned out to see the waggon approaching at the unusual pace, and was already counting the tempting sheaves of golden corn. To his surprise, however, his frolicsome parishioner wheeled round his team before he brought it to a stand, and then cried aloud, ‘Gaze, Father! yes, gaze in faith on the goodly sight, and believe me, your faith shall stand you in stead of the actual fruition!’ With that he drove his waggon at the same pace at which he had come, straight off to the pastor of Mils, at whose worthy feet he laid the tithe. And this act of ‘poetical justice’ was ratified by ecclesiastical authority as a censure on the pusillanimity of the priest of Kolsass, by the transfer of the tithing of Aschbach to the parish of Mils. I have met a counterpart of this story both in England and in Spain; so true is it, as Carlyle has prettily said, that though many traditions have but one root they grow, like the banyan, into a whole overarching labyrinth.
The stately Serviten-kloster outside Volders suggests another adaptation of this metaphor. From the root of one saint’s maxims and example, what an ‘over-arching labyrinth’ of good works will grow up and spread over and adorn the face of the earth, even in the most distant parts. In the year 1590 there was born at Trent a boy named Hyppolitus Guarinoni, who was destined to graft upon Tirol the singular virtues of St. Charles Borromeo. Attached early to the household of the saintly Archbishop of Milan, Guarinoni grew up to embody in action his spirit of devotion and charity. By St. Charles’s advice and assistance he followed the study of medicine, and took his degree in his twenty-fifth year. Shortly after, he was appointed physician in ordinary to the then ruler of Tirol, Archduke Ferdinand II. His fervent piety marked him as specially fit to be further entrusted with the sanitary care of the convent founded some years before by the Princesses Magdalen, Margaret, and Helena, Ferdinand’s sisters, at Hall, and called the Königliche Damenstift.[6] All the time that was left free by these public engagements he spent by the bedsides of the poor of the neighbourhood. The care of the soul ever accompanied his care for their bodies, and many a wanderer owed his reconciliation with heaven to his timely exhortations. Just about this time the incursions of the new doctrines were making themselves felt in this part of Tirol, and some localities, which from their remoteness were out of the way of regular parochial ministrations, were beginning to listen to them. Guarinoni discovered this in the course of his charitable labours, for which no outlying Sennerhütte was inaccessible. In 1628 he obtained special leave, though a layman, from the Bishop of Brixen, to preach in localities which had no resident pastor; he further published a little work which he used to distribute among the people, designed to show them how many corporal infirmities are induced by neglect of the whole-some maxims of religion. Besides the restored unity of the faith in his country, two other monuments of his piety remain: the Church of St. Charles by the bridge of Volders, and the Sanctuary of Judenstein. In his moments of leisure it was his favourite occupation to commit to writing for the instruction of posterity the traditional details of the life of St. Nothburga, and of the holy child Andreas of Rinn, which were at his date even more rife in the mouths of the peasantry of the neighbourhood than at present. He only died in 1654, having devoted himself to these good works for nearly half a century.
The church by which he endeavoured to bring under observation and imitation the distinguishing qualities of St. Charles, was erected on a spot famous in the Middle Ages as a bandit’s den; the building occupied thirty-four years, and was consecrated but a short time before his death. Baron Karl von Fieger, from whom he bought the site, a few years later added to it the Servite monastery, which, though it exhibits all the vices of the architecture of its date, yet bears tokens that its imperfections are not due to any stint of means. Its three cupolas and other structural arrangements are designed in commemoration of the Holy Trinity—a mystery which is held in very special honour throughout Austria. In the decorations, later benefactors have carried on Guarinoni’s intention, the acts of St. Charles being portrayed in the frescoes, completed in 1764, by which Knoller has earned some celebrity in the world of art for himself and for the church: they display his conversion from the stiffer German style of his master, Paul Trogger, to the Italian manner. That over the entrance conveys a tradition of St. Charles, predicting to Guarinoni, while his page, that he would one day erect a church in his honour; that of the larger cupola is an apotheosis of the saint. The picture of the high-altar sets forth the saint ministering to the plague-stricken; it is Knoller’s boldest attempt at colouring.
Near the entrance door may be observed a considerable piece of rock built into the wall, entitled by the people ‘Stein des Gehorsams,’[7] its history being that at the time when the church was building it was detached from the rock above by a landslip, and threatened the workmen with destruction. Its course was arrested at the behest of a pious monk, who was overseeing the works.[8]
After passing the Servitenkloster a footpath may easily be found which leads to Judenstein and Rinn, the seat of one of the much-contested mediæval beliefs accusing the Jews of the sacrifice of Christian children. It may be better, in describing this stem of this banyan, to visit Rinn the further place first, and take Judenstein on our way back. The country traversed is well wooded, and further diversified by the bizarre outlines of the steeples of Hall seen across the river, while the mighty Glunggeser-Spitz rises 7,500 feet above you. It invites a visit for its amenity and its associations, though the relics of the infant Saint ‘Anderle’ are no longer there. His father died, it would seem, while he was a child in arms; his mother earned her living in the fields, and while she was absent used to leave her boy at Pentzenhof in charge of his godfather, Mayr. One day, when he was about three years old—it was the 12th July 1462—she was cutting corn, when suddenly she saw three drops of blood upon her hand without any apparent means of accounting for the token, one with which many superstitions were connected.[9] Her motherly instincts were alarmed, and, without an instant’s consideration, she threw down her sickle and hurried home. A little field-chapel to St. Isidor the husbandman, St. Nothburga, and St. Andrew of Rinn, was subsequently built upon this spot. Arrived at Mayr’s house, the forebodings of her anxious heart were redoubled at not finding her darling playing about as he was wont. The faithless godfather, taken by surprise at her unexpected return, only stammered broken excuses in answer to her reiterated inquiries. At last he exclaimed, thinking to calm her frenzy, ‘If he is not here, here is something better—a hat full of golden pieces, which we will share between us.’ He took down his hat, but to his consternation instead of finding it heavy with its golden contents, there was nothing in it but withered leaves! At this sight he was overcome with fear and horror; his speech forsook him, and his senses together, and he ended his days raving mad.
The distracted mother, meantime, pursued her inquiries and perquisitions; but all she could learn was that certain Jews,[10] returning from their harvesting at Botzen, had over-tempted Mayr by their offers and persuaded him to sell the child to them, but with the assurance that he should come to no harm. Little reassured by the announcement, she ran madly into the neighbouring birchwood, whither she had learned they had bent their steps, and there came upon the lifeless body of her treasure, hanging bloodless and mangled from a tree. A large stone near bore traces of having been used as a sacrificial stone, and the clothes, which had been rudely torn off, lay scattered about; the many wounds of his tender form showed by how cruel a martyrdom he had been called to share in the massacre of the Innocents.
His remains were tenderly gathered and laid to rest, and his memory held in affection by all the neighbourhood; nevertheless, though there were many signs of the supernatural connected with the event, it did not receive all the veneration it might have been expected to call forth.