The rebuilding of the old Tusset Chapel
May 1987
A letter from one of the initiators of the rebuilding
Esteemed Mr Weber!
I have read the brochure „Consecration of the new Tusset Chapel“ with interest. Because it is known to me that you are the principal initiator of the building of the new Tusset Chapel in Philippsreut. The Tusset Chapel is an outstanding monument and a pearl of folk architecture.
I have lived in Prachatitz for 32 years now; I came to know the chapel in the time of my youth, when it was not yet damaged. Sadly! – vandalism and the „ravages of time“ have almost destroyed this unique monument. It was a great pity! You are probably aware that this year a general repair of the Tusset Chapel was carried out at the expense of the Czechoslovak state. The initiative for the restoration was pushed through by simple admirers and friends of the Bohemian Forest. I count myself among them; I work here voluntarily for the protection of nature. The new chapel at Philippsreut helped bring about the restoration of the original chapel on the Tussetberg.
In the repair, only the masonry and the timber structure of the front gable remained of the original chapel – everything else is new. The roof is covered with shingles. Of the original fabric of the chapel I have managed to secure a board with old inscriptions and signatures of inhabitants of Wallern and the surrounding area.
Legible are, for example, Anton Sitter, Pinsker, Schröder and so on; the inscriptions are marked with dates from the year 1871. With some of them the house number is also given. The board measures approximately 150 X 25 cm; in the lower part it has two circular openings.
I should like to dedicate this board to you. Please write and tell me whether you are interested in it. Otherwise I invite you and your friends to visit (and inspect) the repaired Tusset Chapel.
Enclosed I send a photograph of the restored chapel. On it are the conservationists who carried out the clearing-up work here.
I apologise that I am not writing this letter in German, but I do not have a good command of this language, especially the grammar, and read with the help of a dictionary.
With warmest greetings
The consecration of the renewed old Tusset Chapel
August 1990
It looked and sounded like a miracle: where less than a year before hardly anyone had been permitted to set foot, because barbed wire and prohibition signs forbade it, where beneath fallen branches and man-high ferns the last hour seemed to be striking for the Tusset Chapel, the Tusset forest had come to life on the Saturday. From three sides crowds of people streamed along the former main pilgrimage paths to the summit of the mountain – Bohemian Forest Germans and Czechs who wanted to be there when the renewed pilgrimage chapel received the blessing of the Church again.
„It was a house of God, but you have made it a den of thieves“ – so adapted, the word of the Gospel would have fitted and could have been applied to the condition of the chapel on the Tusset, a place of pilgrimage of the lower Bohemian Forest known far beyond the borders of the surrounding land. Smashed pews, columns torn from their anchorings, Marian pictures pierced by shots, walls, a roof structure sinking alarmingly, a roof that had already become leaky in many places – that was how the little forest church looked only a few months before. About five years earlier, in anticipation of its decline, the true-to-scale replica of the Marian church had already been built at Philippsreuth. After the change in the neighbouring country the Czechs remembered the desecrated chapel, set to work to preserve it, clothed it in an entirely new external façade and carried out corresponding renewals, so that it is now in almost nothing inferior to its sister at Philippsreuth. Many who saw it again after years, who knew its appearance from the eighties, could hardly believe their eyes at what they beheld there in the shade of tall beeches, leaning against the rock on which a watchtower probably once stood, when they caught sight of it after a march that was not entirely easy.
With numerous clergy from this side and the other side of the border, together with Czechs from over there and many Bohemian Forest Germans from over here, the Bishop of Budweis celebrated the service, into which the blessing of the chapel was woven. In his sermon, which the high dignitary of the Church delivered in Czech and German, he called upon the faithful, after a forty-year epoch of injustice in his country, to replace the picture now missing with an even more beautiful one, „which should be painted by a Marian life“ of the Mother of God. „We come from both sides of the border to make peace. Our way should become a pilgrimage of peace, a pilgrimage of reconciliation and a pilgrimage of forgiveness“, said the preacher, who also recalled that reconciliation and forgiveness must precede the justice demanded. Speaking of the picture of the miraculous healing of Jakob Klauser, who recovered his sight at the spring by the Tusset rock, the bishop said that we should all pray for the miracle of seeing better, when the neighbour stands beside us whom we often do not see in his need. „Mary, Mother and Protectress of the Bohemian Forest, pray for us“ – so the dignitary of the Church called out into the forest, where of course his call did not fade away without an echo: Germans and Czechs, sitting harmoniously side by side, singing and praying, will surely have understood his appeal, and perhaps in that hour already begun to build further bridges of understanding.
