Bendern, the hill where modern Liechtenstein began

If I could show only one place in the Unterland to someone trying to understand Liechtenstein, it would be Bendern’s hill. It isn’t spectacular, just a rise with a church, a rectory and a square with a fountain, but this is where the gesture that began the country we know took place. The views over the Rhine are rather good, too.

Why is Bendern the country’s birthplace?

In 1699 Prince Johann Adam Andreas of Liechtenstein bought the lordship of Schellenberg, today’s Unterland. On 16 March that year, on the square below the old rectory, his new subjects pledged their loyalty, now called Bongertplatz. The municipality of Gamprin calls the hill the birthplace of Liechtenstein, and the tourist board sees the spot as the starting point of today’s Liechtenstein. Thirteen years later came the purchase of Vaduz and, in 1719, the union of the two halves. The whole story is on the history of Liechtenstein.

From 1699 the Landammann, the highest local office, was also elected here, having previously been chosen at the Rofenberg in Eschen. In 1980 a fountain by Georg Malin was set up on the square to mark the oath, and in 1999 the hill hosted the Unterland’s 300th anniversary celebrations with a play, «Der Ritter vom Eschnerberg».

What stood here before the oath

Long before 1699, the hill already had a very long past. Excavations between 1969 and 1977 found Bronze Age pottery, a 6th- and 7th-century manor complex of roughly 30 by 25 metres and, built on its walls, the first church, from the 8th or 9th century. The site has been lived on ever since.

The Church of the Assumption is recorded in 1045, when half of it belonged to the convent at Schänis, and in 1194 it passed to the Premonstratensians of St Luzi in Chur. The Gothic chancel was consecrated in 1481 and the tower finished around 1509, and the Lexikon says it formed part of a Vorarlberg warning line because of its exposed position. What you see outside comes from two makeovers, a neo-Gothic one in 1875-79 and another in 1969-70 that stripped much of that ornament away.

Inside, the basement is what would draw me in. The Lexikon says you can walk through it and see the foundations of the earlier churches. The paintings in the window reveals of the south wall are also among the oldest in Liechtenstein, and there’s a Madonna from around 1480 and a copy of a Lenten veil from 1612. The country’s other churches are covered on churches and chapels in Liechtenstein.

The monks’ house and the institute

The rectory, known as the Statthalterei, was finished around 1532. Between 1538 and 1636 it was the headquarters of the St Luzi canons, who had fled Chur during the Reformation. The old parish barn has housed the Liechtenstein-Institut since 1997, a research centre based in Bendern since 1986 that publishes the Historisches Lexikon, the reference work I quote so often.

On the western slope of the hill is the Lourdes grotto, cut into the rock between 1896 and 1898 at the suggestion of the parish priest Franz Xaver Häusle and consecrated on 7 August 1898. The municipality describes it as a regional centre of Marian devotion and a stop on several processions.

A Rhine crossing with a past

Bendern owes a great deal to the river. From the late 14th century, or the 16th at the latest, a ferry crossed to Haag in Switzerland on the road from Feldkirch to the Toggenburg, used by pilgrims from Tyrol and Vorarlberg heading for Einsiedeln and Santiago. A wooden bridge arrived in 1868, burnt down in 1894, was rebuilt and finally collapsed after another fire in 1974. Alongside it, the country’s first prestressed concrete bridge had gone up in 1963-64. What the river border looks like today is on the Rhine in Liechtenstein.

It wasn’t always peaceful. In 1499 Swiss confederates burnt Bendern during the Swabian War, and on 6 March 1799 French troops crossed the Rhine here and plundered houses and church. The flood of 25 September 1927 swept away the customs house. And a titbit for the curious, in 1784 Bendern was said to make the best wine in the lordship.

Getting there

The hill sits beside the Bendern bus stops, served by route 11 towards Feldkirch, 35 towards Hinterschellenberg, 36 from Vaduz and Schaan to Ruggell and 37 across to Sennwald. Walkers reach the hill on stage 4 of the Liechtenstein Trail, Nendeln to Ruggell, between Eschen and the Grossabünt bathing lake. Bendern is also home to the Grand Casino, which I compare with the others in casinos in Liechtenstein.