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Stoss
942 m
Appenzell Outer Rhodes / St. Gallen
The Stoss is a low pass at 943 metres on the upper edge of the steep Rhine-valley slope, linking Altstätten in St. Gallen with Gais in Appenzell.
942 m
Appenzell Outer Rhodes / St. Gallen
The Stoss is a low pass at 943 metres on the upper edge of the steep Rhine-valley slope, linking Altstätten in St. Gallen with Gais in Appenzell.
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The Stoss is a low pass at 943 metres on the upper edge of the steep Rhine-valley slope, linking Altstätten in St. Gallen with Gais in Appenzell. Modest as it looks, it is one of the hallowed places of Appenzell history. On 17 June 1405, during the Appenzell Wars, the Appenzellers fell back up the pass to make their stand, in their long quarrel with the Prince-Abbot of St. Gallen and his Habsburg backers. They left the Letzi – the defensive barrier a few hundred metres below the summit – unmanned, let some 1,200 of the enemy push through, and then about 400 Appenzell hillmen fell on them from above, surprising a foe already worn out by the long climb on a cold, rainy June day, and routed them. The victory sealed the freedom of the old, then-undivided land of Appenzell from the Prince-Abbot of St. Gallen.
That day became foundational. A battle chapel was raised at the Stoss in the 15th century, and a stone monument added in 1905 for the 500th anniversary, both still standing by the road. Every May, pilgrims from Appenzell still walk the nine kilometres up to the chapel to honour the fallen, reciting the rosary as they go – a living tradition six centuries old. The pass guarded the country in modern times too, with tank barriers and bunkers built across it from 1937; today the narrow-gauge Altstätten–Gais railway climbs over it, and cyclists take its hairpins up from the Rhine valley – but the Stoss belongs, above all, to a single rainy June morning in 1405.
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