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House history

History and art in the hotel

The Tschitscher with the NIkolsdorf volunteer fire brigade, around 1900

The foundation walls of the games and book hotel Tschitscher date back to the 15th century. The building has stood in its present form since 1672.

In this year, Johann Baptist Grevi-Tschitscher also received the Brandwein-Ausschank-Gerechtsame, the term for the hospitality licence at the time.

At this time, the Tschitscher had its own brewery and was a post inn with a horse changing station. In 1809, a liberation plan for the Tyrolean folk hero Andreas Hofer was devised and carried out.

Due to adverse circumstances and possibly betrayal, the bribe with which Hofer was to be ransomed from the Italians in Mantua arrived too late and so his execution could no longer be prevented.

With the construction of the Pustertal railway, which went into operation in 1871, tourism also arrived in our region.

The landlord at the time, Gottfried Mayr-Hassler, who was also the mayor and a member of parliament, renamed his business "Gasthof zum goldenen Stern" and set the first tourist trends: guest rooms were furnished for the new "summer visitors" and a veranda was added to the house. Together with the second landlord in the village, a swimming pool was built and a spectacular hiking trail - the Hochstadl Leitersteig - was constructed on Nikolsdorf's local mountain. Until the First World War, pioneering tourism work was carried out here on a small scale in the greater Lienz area. After the turmoil of war, there was another small flare-up of tourism in Nikolsdorf in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which was abruptly interrupted by the Second World War.

The new tourism, as tourism was called until the 1980s, only began to pick up again at the end of the 1950s and reached its peak in Nikolsdorf in the 1970s. Incidentally, a new swimming pool, the Nikolsdorf forest swimming pool, was built in 1966. Rainer Mayr-Hassler, the landlord of the Tschitscher, was again in a leading position as chairman of the tourism association together with his friend and fellow landlord Johann Winkler, the owner of the Gasthof Löwen in Nikolsdorf.

Art in the games hotel - Romana Leitner

The large-format oil paintings with the classic games in the guest rooms were created by the artist Romana Leitner in one of her very rare commissions.

The small-format originals of our guest guidance system on the ground floor are also by the artist, as are the two oil paintings in the lounge, which symbolise the hotel and the host couple.

Romana Leitner lives and works in Gamlitz in southern Styria. In the Welles art space, she exhibits current works in oil on canvas as well as sculptures made of hardwood and stone in her workshop and studio. Romana Leitner processes feelings, longings and desires, power, love and femininity in her expressive, self-contained paintings and sculptures. Her works reflect the artist's emotional world and at the same time allow for personal associations and content.

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