Gurk Abbey (German : Stift Gurk) was a short-lived nunnery in Gurk, Carinthia (in present-day Austria), founded in 1043 by Saint Hemma of Gurk.
German is a West Germanic language that is mainly spoken in Central Europe. It is the most widely spoken and official or co-official language in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol (Italy), the German-speaking Community of Belgium, and Liechtenstein. It is also one of the three official languages of Luxembourg and a co-official language in the Opole Voivodeship in Poland. The languages which are most similar to German are the other members of the West Germanic language branch: Afrikaans, Dutch, English, the Frisian languages, Low German/Low Saxon, Luxembourgish, and Yiddish. There are also strong similarities in vocabulary with Danish, Norwegian and Swedish, although those belong to the North Germanic group. German is the second most widely spoken Germanic language, after English.
The term Stift is derived from the verb stiften and originally meant a donation. Such donations usually comprised earning assets, originally landed estates with serfs defraying dues or with vassal tenants of noble rank providing military services and forwarding dues collected from serfs. In modern times the earning assets could also be financial assets donated to form a fund to maintain an endowment, especially a charitable foundation. When landed estates, donated as a Stift to maintain the college of a monastery, the chapter of a collegiate church or the cathedral chapter of a diocese, formed a territory enjoying the status of an imperial state within the Holy Roman Empire then the term Stift often also denotes the territory itself. In order to specify this territorial meaning the term Stift is then composed with the compound "hoch" as Hochstift, denoting a prince-bishopric, or Erzstift for a prince-archbishopric.
Gurk is an Austrian market town and former episcopal see in the District of Sankt Veit an der Glan, Carinthia.
The monastery arose at the site of a former Celtic temple, dedicated to the Gallo-Roman goddess Epona. In 898 the Carolingian emperor Arnulf granted the Gurk valley to his son Zwentibold, one of Saint Hemma's ancestors. A widow since the killing of her husband William, margrave on the Sann in 1036, she founded a convent of noble ladies on the Gurk manor, apparently without implying a strict order rule. She had a church erected, dedicated to Saint Mary, which was consecrated on 15 August 1043. Her endowment comprised extended estates in the Duchy of Carinthia and its Styrian and Carniolan marches. She also ceded large properties in the Enns valley to the Salzburg archbishop, the basis for the foundation of Admont Abbey in 1074.
Gallo-Roman religion was a fusion of the traditional religious practices of the Gauls, who were originally Celtic speakers, and the Roman and Hellenistic religions introduced to the region under Roman Imperial rule. It was the result of selective acculturation.
In Gallo-Roman religion, Epona was a protector of horses, ponies, donkeys, and mules. She was particularly a goddess of fertility, as shown by her attributes of a patera, cornucopia, ears of grain and the presence of foals in some sculptures. She and her horses might also have been leaders of the soul in the after-life ride, with parallels in Rhiannon of the Mabinogion. The worship of Epona, "the sole Celtic divinity ultimately worshipped in Rome itself", was widespread in the Roman Empire between the first and third centuries AD; this is unusual for a Celtic deity, most of whom were associated with specific localities.
The Carolingian Empire (800–888) was a large empire in western and central Europe during the early Middle Ages. It was ruled by the Carolingian dynasty, which had ruled as kings of the Franks since 751 and as kings of the Lombards of Italy from 774. In 800, the Frankish king Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III in an effort to revive the Roman Empire in the west during a vacancy in the throne of the eastern Roman Empire. After a civil war (840–43) following the death of Emperor Louis the Pious, the empire was divided into autonomous kingdoms, with one king still recognised as emperor, but with little authority outside his own kingdom. The unity of the empire and the hereditary right of the Carolingians continued to be acknowledged, preceding the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806.
Saint Hemma possibly joined the Gurk convent herself. She died about two years later and was buried in the monastery church. The nunnery was dissolved in 1070 by Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg, who used the assets so realised to establish the suffragan Diocese of Gurk centered at Gurk Cathedral. Hemma's mortal remains were transferred to the newly erected cathedral in 1174; the former abbey church decayed and was finally demolished in the 19th century. [1]
Blessed Gebhard of Salzburg, also occasionally known as Gebhard of Sussex, was Archbishop of Salzburg from 1060 until his death. He was one of the fiercest opponents of King Henry IV of Germany during the Investiture Controversy.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Gurk-Klagenfurt is a Catholic diocese covering the Austrian state of Carinthia. It is part of the ecclesiastical province of Salzburg. Though named after Gurk Cathedral, the bishop's see since 1787 is in Klagenfurt.
Gurk Cathedral is a Romanesque pillar basilica in Gurk, in the Austrian state of Carinthia. The former cathedral and current co-cathedral of the Catholic Diocese of Gurk was built from 1140 to 1200, it is one of the most important Romanesque buildings in Austria.
