French Cross

Today’s listed French Cross was donated by the Styrian estates and consecrated in 1852. A naturalistic cast-iron corpus of Christ is nailed on it. There had already been a wayside cross on the same spot. There is a dubious legend surrounding the origin of the cross, according to which an escaped convict from the Schlossberg is said to have erected a cross at the spot where he freed himself from his shack¬les. Yet it is more plausible to place events during the siege of the Schlossberg in 1809 in the vicinity of the cross. Not only French soldiers died here, but also Lieutenant Carl König, who was shot in the back as a parliamentary.