“The monuments should remain alive”

2023-09-22 22:10:28

UPPER AUSTRIA. How did we live before? What did houses look like? What did our production facilities look like? Answers to questions like these can be found every year at “Monument Day”, which will be announced again throughout Austria tomorrow, Sunday, September 24th. There are 280 properties nationwide, around 40 in Upper Austria alone. As a rule, the “participants” are museums, which not only house exhibitions, but also become exhibition objects themselves. They are also a lively research field for restorers.

How are frescoes uncovered? What new conservation methods are there? Questions like these, says Klaus Landa, managing director of the Association of Upper Austrian Museums, are answered by many of the museums and objects. “The walls of the historic buildings have been painted over countless times over the centuries. You then have to look at how far back, to which century, you take something back, how many layers of the overpainting do you remove,” says Landa. As an exciting example, he cites the Grein City Theater, the oldest surviving civil theater in Austria, which was restored in 2022. “We are a monument” will also be the motto tomorrow in Spital am Pyhrn, where the Lindermayrschmiede is at the same time a museum, monument and intangible UNESCO cultural heritage.

The “Monument Day” extends from the northernmost monument – the Maria Trost pilgrimage church in Rohrbach – to the southernmost monument, the Lindermayrschmiede, and from Grein, the easternmost monument, to Braunau-Ranshofen, where the monument organ marks the westernmost point . And in between there are numerous small and large museums and monuments in Linz, Pfaffing, Lambach, Scharnstein…

Free entry to the museums

By the way, all participating museums are open with free admission. The “Monument Day” is coordinated by the Federal Monuments Office and this year it is dedicated to “100 Years of the Austrian Monument Protection Act”.

“Monuments are part of our identity; they shape our landscape with their historical architecture. These old buildings have a very special atmosphere; people, entire generations, have lived here for centuries. They breathe history in the truest sense of the word,” says Landa. “But it’s not just the old, the preserved things that are exciting, but also how contemporary these objects are today, how they are being brought to life. Because that’s what it’s all about: the monuments should remain alive.”