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Tyrol (state) - Wikipedia Jump to content

Tyrol (state)

Coordinates: 47°16′N 11°24′E / 47.27°N 11.4°E / 47.27; 11.4
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from State of Tyrol)
For other uses, see Tyrol.

Tyrol
Tirol
State
Federal State of Tyrol
Bundesland Tirol (German)
Bundesland Tirol (Bavarian)
Stato Federale della Tirolo (Italian)
Flag of Tyrol
Flag
Coat of arms of Tyrol
Coat of arms
Official logo of Tyrol
Brandmark
Anthem: Andreas-Hofer-Lied
Location of Tyrol
Coordinates: 47°16′N 11°24′E / 47.27°N 11.4°E / 47.27; 11.4
Country Austria
CapitalInnsbruck
Government
 • BodyTyrolean Landtag
 • GovernorAnton Mattle (ÖVP)
 • Deputy GovernorsJosef Geisler (ÖVP)
Philip Wohglemuth (SPÖ)
Area
 • Total
12,534 km2 (4,839 sq mi)
Population
 (1 January 2023)
 • Total
771,304
 • Density61.537/km2 (159.38/sq mi)
GDP
[1]
 • Total€45.400 billion (2021)
 • Per capita€46,700 (2021)
Time zoneUTC+1 (CET)
 • Summer (DST)UTC+2 (CEST)
ISO 3166 codeAT-7
HDI (2022)0.938[2]
very high · 3rd of 9
NUTS RegionAT3
Votes in Bundesrat5 (of 62)
Websitewww.tirol.gv.at

Tyrol (/tɪˈroʊl, taɪˈroʊl, ˈtaɪroʊl/ tih-ROHL, ty-ROHL, TY-rohl;[3] German: Tirol [tiˈroːl] ⓘ; Italian: Tirolo [tiˈrɔːlo]) is an Austrian state. It consists of two non-contiguous parts, North Tyrol and East Tyrol, separated by the Austrian state of Salzburg and the Italian province of South Tyrol, which was part of Tyrol until 1919. It is a constituent part of the present-day Euroregion Tyrol–South Tyrol–Trentino (together with South Tyrol and Trentino in Italy). The capital of Tyrol is Innsbruck.[4]

Tyrol is dominated by high mountain ranges, including the Ötztal Alps, the Zillertal Alps, and the Kitzbühel Alps, with the Grossglockner and other major Alpine peaks nearby. The region is traversed by important rivers such as the Inn and the Isel, and is noted for its valleys, glaciers, and alpine passes. Its strategic location has historically made Tyrol a key transit region between northern and southern Europe, with the Brenner Pass serving as one of the most important north–south routes across the Alps since Roman times.

Historically, Tyrol formed part of the County of Tyrol, which emerged as a distinct territorial entity of the Holy Roman Empire in the Late Middle Ages. It passed to the Habsburg dynasty in the 14th century, becoming an integral part of the Habsburg Monarchy. Following the end of World War I and the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, Tyrol was divided: South Tyrol and Trentino were ceded to Italy under the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919, leaving North and East Tyrol within the newly founded Republic of Austria. This division remains a defining feature of the region’s political geography and cultural identity.

Today, Tyrol is known for its strong alpine traditions, vibrant tourism industry, and role as one of Austria’s most popular destinations for skiing, mountaineering, and hiking. The state combines modern infrastructure with a strong preservation of local culture, evident in its folk music, festivals, and architectural heritage. Tyrol also plays an important role in Austria’s economy, with tourism, winter sports, and alpine agriculture complemented by modern industries and universities centered in Innsbruck.

Geography

[edit]

Tyrol is separated into two parts, divided by a 7-kilometre-wide (4.3 mi) strip of Salzburg State. The two constituent parts of Tyrol are the northern and larger North Tyrol (Nordtirol) and the southeastern and smaller East Tyrol (Osttirol). Salzburg State lies to the east of North Tyrol, while on the south Tyrol has a border to the Italian province of South Tyrol, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the First World War. With a land area of 12,683.85 km2 (4,897.26 sq mi), Tyrol is the third-largest federal state in Austria.

North Tyrol shares its borders with the federal states Salzburg in the east and Vorarlberg in the west. In the north, it adjoins the German state of Bavaria; in the south, it shares borders with the Italian province of South Tyrol and the Swiss canton of Graubünden. East Tyrol shares its borders with the Austrian state of Carinthia to the east and Italy's Province of Belluno (Veneto) to the south.

The state's territory is located entirely within the Eastern Alps at the Brenner Pass. The highest mountain in the state is the Großglockner, part of the Hohe Tauern range on the border with Carinthia. It has a height of 3,797 m (12,457.35 ft), making it the highest mountain in Austria.

Lakes

[edit]

History

[edit]
Main article: History of Tyrol
Golden Roof, Innsbruck

Ancient and Early Middle Ages

[edit]

In ancient times, the region was split between the Roman provinces of Raetia (west of the Inn River) and Noricum. From the mid-6th century, it was resettled by Germanic Bavarii tribes.[citation needed] In the Early Middle Ages it formed the southern part of the German stem duchy of Bavaria, until the Counts of Tyrol, former Vogt officials of the Trent and Brixen prince-bishops at Tyrol Castle, achieved imperial immediacy after the deposition of the Bavarian duke Henry the Proud in 1138, and their possessions formed a state of the Holy Roman Empire in its own right.

Medieval and Early Modern Eras

[edit]

When the Counts of Tyrol died out in 1253, their estates were inherited by the Meinhardiner Counts of Görz. In 1271, the Tyrolean possessions were divided between Count Meinhard II of Görz and his younger brother Albert I, who took the lands of East Tyrol around Lienz and attached them (as "outer county") to his committal possessions around Gorizia ("inner county").

The last Tyrolean countess of the Meinhardiner Dynasty, Margaret, bequeathed her assets to the Habsburg duke Rudolph IV of Austria in 1363. In 1420, the committal residence was relocated from Meran (Merano) to Innsbruck. The Tyrolean lands were reunited when the Habsburgs inherited the estates of the extinct Counts of Görz in 1500.

19th Century and WWI

[edit]

In the course of the German mediatization in 1803, the prince-bishoprics of Trent and Brixen were secularized and merged into the County of Tyrol (which in the next year became a constituent land of the Austrian Empire), but Tyrol was ceded to the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1805. Andreas Hofer led the Tyrolean Rebellion against the French and Bavarian occupiers. Later, South Tyrol was ceded to the Kingdom of Italy, a client state of the First French Empire, by Bavaria in 1810. After Napoleon's defeat, the whole of Tyrol was returned to Austria in 1814.

Tyrol was a Cisleithanian Kronland (royal territory) of Austria-Hungary from 1867. The County of Tyrol then extended beyond the boundaries of today's federal state, including North Tyrol and East Tyrol; South Tyrol and Trentino (Welschtirol) as well as three municipalities, which today are part of the adjacent province of Belluno. After World War I, these lands became part of the Kingdom of Italy according to the 1915 London Pact and the provisions of the Treaty of Saint Germain. From November 1918, it was occupied by 20,000–22,000 soldiers of the Italian Army.[5]

Heinrich Maier, Walter Caldonazzi and their group helped the allies to fight the V-2, which was produced by concentration camp prisoners.

WWII

[edit]

Tyrol was the center of an important resistance group against Nazi Germany around Walter Caldonazzi, which united with the group around the priest Heinrich Maier and the Tyrolean Franz Josef Messner. The Catholic resistance group very successfully passed on plans and production facilities for V-1 rockets, V-2 rockets, Tiger tanks, Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet and other aircraft to the Allies, with which they could target German production facilities. Maier and his group informed the American secret service OSS very early on about the mass murder of Jews in Auschwitz. For after the war they planned an Austria united with South Tyrol and Bavaria.[6]

After World War II, North Tyrol was governed by France and East Tyrol was part of the British Zone of occupation until Austria regained independence in 1955.

Towns

[edit]
View of Innsbruck from Mt. Bergisel
A view from the tower of the old townhall to Innsbruck Cathedral
Hall in Tirol

The capital, Innsbruck, is known for its university, and especially for its medicine. Tyrol is popular for its famous ski resorts, which include Kitzbühel, Ischgl and St. Anton. The 15 largest towns in Tyrol are:

Town Inhabitants
January 2017
1. Innsbruck 132,236
2. Kufstein 18,973
3. Telfs 15,582
4. Hall in Tirol 13,801
5. Schwaz 13,606
6. Wörgl 13,537
7. Lienz 11,945
8. Imst 10,371
9. St. Johann in Tirol 9,425
10. Rum 9,063
11. Kitzbühel 8,341
12. Zirl 8,134
13. Wattens 7,870
14. Landeck 7,764
15. Jenbach 7,088

Demographics

[edit]
Historical population
YearPop.±%
1869236,426—    
1880244,736+3.5%
1890249,984+2.1%
1900266,374+6.6%
1910304,713+14.4%
1923313,888+3.0%
1934349,098+11.2%
1939363,959+4.3%
1951427,465+17.4%
1961462,899+8.3%
1971544,483+17.6%
1981586,663+7.7%
1991631,410+7.6%
2001673,504+6.7%
2011709,319+5.3%
2021762,652+7.5%
Source: Censuses[7]

The historical population is given in the following chart:

Economy

[edit]

The federal state's gross domestic product (GDP) was 34.6 billion euro in 2018, accounting for 9% of Austria's economic output. GDP per capita adjusted for purchasing power was 40,900 euro or 136% of the EU27 average in the same year.[8]

Transport

[edit]

Tyrol has long been a central hub for European long-distance routes and thus a transit land for trans-European trade over the Alps. As early as the 1st century B.C. Tyrol had one of the most important north–south links of the Roman Empire, the Via Claudia Augusta. Roman roads crossed the Tyrol from the Po Plain in present-day Italy, following the course of the Etsch and Eisack in present South Tyrol over the Brenner and then following the northern Wipp valley to Hall. From there roads branched along the River Inn. The Via Raetia went westwards and up onto the Seefeld Plateau, where it crossed into Bavaria where Scharnitz is today. The Porta Claudia, built in the early 17th century is a fortification that underlines the importance of the road in the Early Modern Period.

Today Tyrol has international road, rail and air connections. Innsbruck Airport is Tyrol's international airport. In addition there are several smaller airports in various places such as St. Johann in Tirol, Höfen in the Außerfern or Langkampfen. Many public transit companies operate a common tariff scheme as part of the Tyrol Transport Association.

Administrative divisions

[edit]
Districts of Tyrol

The federal state is divided into nine districts (Bezirke); one of them, Innsbruck, is a statutory city. There are 277 municipalities. The districts and their administrative centres, from west to east and north to south, are:

North Tyrol
East Tyrol

Sister relationships

[edit]

Culture

[edit]
Traditional long-skirted dirndls from Lienz in Tyrol

The traditional form of mural art known as Lüftlmalerei is typical of Tyrolean villages and towns.

Kletzenbrot is a sweet bread made with dried fruits and nuts for the Advent season. Because it is associated with Tyrol it is also known as "Tyrolean Dried Fruit Bread".

Tyrol also has a strong history of folk theater, which has influenced the culture since the late Middle Ages and well into the 19th century.[9] Today in Tyrol, particularly in Innsbruck, there are folk theatre summer festivals and evening shows catering to traditional Tyrolean theatre, music, and dancing.

Identity

[edit]

The question of which regional unit was the bearer of primary identification was raised in the 1987 Austrian Consciousness Survey. The possible answers were: the hometown (local patriotism), one's own province (regional patriotism), (Central) Europe (European consciousness), the world (cosmopolitanism).[10]

Emotional connectedness according to territorial units (1987)
in: Vienna Lower Austria Burgenland Tyrol Carinthia Vorarlberg Styria Upper Austria Salzburg
Homeplace 38 30 31 16 23 21 25 35 24
Bundesland 8 16 24 58 53 44 39 23 33
Austrian 46 55 44 19 24 28 32 37 35
German 1 0 - 1 - - 2 1 2
(Middle-)European 4 1 - 1 - 4 2 1 4
World Citizen 4 - 1 2 - 3 1 2 -
other 2 0 - - 1 - 0 0 3

A research project led by Peter Diem[11] offers a thoroughly comparable picture: In Vienna and Lower Austria, Austria patriotism dominated (1988) over territorial consciousness.[clarification needed] In Upper Austria, Salzburg and Styria, national patriotism slightly outweighed federal state patriotism.[clarification needed] In Carinthia, Tyrol and Vorarlberg, national patriotism clearly dominated. When asked to rate their own national patriotism on a ten-point scale, 83% of Carinthians, 69% of Tyroleans, 63% of Vorarlbergers, Burgenlanders and Styrians, 59% of Upper Austrians, 55% of Lower Austrians, 47% of Viennese and 43% of Salzburgers gave it the highest value.

The results of this study underline the assumption of a highly developed sense of national identity in most Austrian provinces. Peculiarly, the federal provinces are also largely "endogamous" in relation to other provinces, i.e. they correspond to what ethnologists would call a gentile association, a "tribe".

It is therefore also permissible to identify the inhabitants of the Austrian provinces as the "tribes" that a book published in London would like to portray.[12]

[edit]

The first thirteen of the Chalet School series of books by Elinor Brent-Dyer, and part of the fourteenth, The Chalet School in Exile (1940), are set in Tyrol, on Pertisau on Lake Achen.[13] Brent-Dyer had visited the Tyrol in the 1920s.[14] Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer have written that Brent-Dyer "used the setting of her fictional school in the Austrian Tyrol to give her readers some hard lessons about Nazi persecution".[15]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ "Basisdaten Bundesländer" (PDF). Retrieved 1 September 2023.
  2. ^ "Sub-national HDI - Area Database - Global Data Lab". hdi.globaldatalab.org. Retrieved 13 September 2018.
  3. ^ "Tyrol". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  4. ^ "Tyrol, Austria". Lonely Planet. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  5. ^ "Accademia degli Agiati" (PDF).
  6. ^ Elisabeth Boeckl-Klamper, Thomas Mang, Wolfgang Neugebauer: Gestapo-Leitstelle Wien 1938–1945. Vienna 2018, ISBN 978-3902494832, pp. 299–305; Hans Schafranek: Widerstand und Verrat: Gestapospitzel im antifaschistischen Untergrund. Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3707606225, pp. 161–248; Christoph Thurner "The CASSIA Spy Ring in World War II Austria: A History of the OSS's Maier-Messner Group" (2017), p. 35.
  7. ^ "Historic Censuses - STATISTICS AUSTRIA". Statistics Austria.
  8. ^ "Regional GDP per capita ranged from 30% to 263% of the EU average in 2018". Eurostat.
  9. ^ Bernhart, Toni. “Imagining the Audience in Eighteenth-Century Folk Theatre in Tyrol.” In Dramatic Experience: The Poetics of Drama and the Early Modern Public Sphere(s), edited by Katja Gvozdeva, Tatiana Korneeva, and Kirill Ospovat, 269–88. Brill, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w76w7w.16.
  10. ^ Österreichbewußtsein im Wandel, Ernst Bruckmüller, 1994
  11. ^ Integrative Phänomene, Diem Peter, 1988
  12. ^ (The Times Guide to the Peoples of Europe, London 1994 The Times guide to the peoples of Europe)
  13. ^ Booy, Miles (2025). The Chalet School Books and the Twentieth Century. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-1-04-039541-7. Retrieved 24 September 2025.
  14. ^ Edwards, Owen Dudley (2007). British Children's Fiction in the Second World War. Edinburgh University Press. p. 301. ISBN 978-0-7486-2872-8. Retrieved 24 September 2025.
  15. ^ Rosoff, Nancy G.; Spencer, Stephanie (2019). British and American School Stories, 1910–1960: Fiction, Femininity, and Friendship. Springer. p. 40. ISBN 978-3-030-05986-6. Retrieved 24 September 2025.
[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Tyrol (state).
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