Heihsgut Manor

The Heihsgut is one of the oldest continuously inhabited houses in the Salzburg-Styrian Alps. The manor stands at the foot of the Speiereck (Radstädter Tauern) in the center of St. Martin, a district of the municipality of St. Michael. Together with a small chapel and a tithe barn, it forms the secular counterpart to the village church, in whose cemetery a Mithraic sanctuary was found under the charnel house in the 19th century.

In 1478, the family that gave the house its name bought it as their free property from the Styrian Benedictine abbey of St. Lambrecht. It probably belonged to the estate in St. Mörten that was devastated during a dispute between the Bishop of Bamberg, the abbey, and the Counts of Ortenburg, and which Rudolf von Habsburg definitively awarded to the monks in 1278.

At the church, three tombstones represent the rise and fall of the family, linked to the prosperity and poverty of the region: a large but simple stone for the acquirer of the house, a rather magnificent one with the coat of arms granted by Charles V in 1532 for his son Lienhard, and a small plaque for the last owner, the grandson of Andreas v. Heihs, ennobled by Charles VI in 1730, who died in poverty in 1839.

The family's standing in the 16th century is attested by the pine parlor from 1545, a waffle iron with the Heihs coat of arms from 1559, and a large tombstone with a portrait and coat of arms for Lienhard's brother, who died in 1544 as parish priest of St. Michael and Murau and archdeacon of Lungau, in the parish church.

His niece Apollonia, a daughter of Lienhard, and her husband, Hanns Gennsprunner zu Radstadt, enlarged the house by incorporating a brick granary and built the large pine parlor on the first floor. This was in 1545, according to a vanished inscription above the doorframe. However, it is possible that the construction of the large tithe barn, dated 1685, first made it possible to integrate the old granary into the main building of the house.