The Sta. Maria Church

28 October 2022

As the name of the village already suggests, the church was dedicated to Mary, the Mother of God. The church first appears in a document in 1167, Sta. Maria in Silvaplana. Sta. Maria became the name of the village. According to legend, Charlemagne founded the church after his campaign in 774/775 against the Lombards and a snowstorm on the Umbrail Pass.

FThe church dates from 1492 and is a renovation by Andreas Bühler (1457-1512) from Austrian Carinthia. Based on religious freedom in the Freistaat der Drei Bünde (Ilanzer Article of 1526), the village adopted the reformation and appointed a pastor from Sent (Unterengadin).

Müstair, however, remained Catholic. The Catholic minority in Sta. Maria was allowed to use the church. They were seated on the left side of the church! Moreover, Sta. Maria had been a place of pilgrimage for centuries.

There were tensions between the two religions. On one occasion, for example, Catholics (left in the church) and Protestants (right in the church) sang louder and louder against each other.

Things went well until 1620 and the beginning of the Bündner Wirren (1619-1639). Catholic Habsburg occupied the valley and banned the new faith. The Protestants stormed the church and threw the (Mary) statues into the Rombach river (Il Rom in the Romansh language).

Downstream, if made of wood, the Catholic inhabitants of South Tyrol fished them out of the Etsch (Adige in Italian) and gave them a place in churches in Lichtenberg, Tschengls and Algund.

De Sta. Maria en Il Rom (de Rombach)

The Protestants regained their former rights with the help of the (Catholic !) French army in 1648. Catholics were allowed to use the church again as long as Catholic residents lived in Sta. Maria. The last one died in 1837. The new statue of Mary, commissioned by the Habsburgs in 1621, was carried in a procession to the monastery of St Johann in St. Müstair. According to the legend, Mary wept.

The church has an 8.22-high medieval image of Christophorus on the outside of the choir, and the portal shows a 1513 fresco of Jesus on the Mount of Olives.

The church is also famous for its marble plaques from the Weißwasserbruch from Laas (South Tyrol), also called the marble village. They tell the story of Val Müstair, Graubünden and South Tyrol: Zuckerbäcker (pastry makers), Säumer, Podestà (bailiffs) of Italian territories conquered by Graubünden in 1512 (Veltlin, Bormio and Chiavenna), immigrants, vicars, the architect of Hotel Schweizerhof (built 1903) Maini Swartz (1858-1937), artists and merchants.

The Schweizerhof and his architect Maini Swartz