Young priest turns forsaken farm into paradise homestead

wow there's like 20 switchbacks here this is supposed to be the easy way up well we're almost to where we're going to park it right i think actually i think we're almost done with the switchbacks no there's like one more two more maybe it's uh okay guys everyone look out for an austrian priest he's going to be walking [Music] there he is wow that was a that was a drive welcome yeah you took the easy road so i'm guessing the roads aren't that great around here in winter not on not on the mountain to get up on the mountain some of the roads do suffer yeah so you spend a lot of time walking yeah i don't have a car like yours so i spent a lot of time walking it is a special experience in training philosophy i'm an aristotelian of sorts and the aristotelian school was called in greece the peripate which means the ones who walk around so yeah i can think better when i walk around i came here because i knew the region from hiking more than 10 years ago i hiked in the area i passed my vacation here i go to the mountains also to see for most of my life i live with views and then i spent two years living in a valley and it even felt like a mental closure in a sense that you couldn't see it was just you were closed in so in a way for me the mountains are places where the external vision helps with the interior seeing in a certain sense so you first came up here i'm a catholic priest so i got the permission from my bishop that i that i could for three years work on different projects and for these projects i wanted to be away from from the noise and everything i've sort of over the years of my travels i've really grown fond of silence so i was looking for a quiet place there's only one person living on the mountain permanently about a kilometer below me that's 70 years old he's my only neighbor [Music] so this area then has a lot of abandoned homes it has a lot of abandoned homes this is true however for for the whole of italy italy has a big population problem and then you have a lot of people who over the last 100 and 150 years left the subsistence lifestyle with two cows and and left for the planes where there's work and where there is industry and where you could make a living and so it's just many of these valleys that just have emptied over the years when i was looking for a place to sort of withdraw for a few years and i saw it and the price had been lowered again because it's sort of in a remote place and and coming up the road for many was too difficult it was just the cheapest place to to get something this is it i hope the kids made it did you find anything did you find anything but you found the house which is sort of half the story already this is here here we're getting into chestnut territory maybe first use your your feet all right this was a house that is more traditional it has a stone slab roof as it is typical for the region in fact these stone slabs this area is called roche corp and roger corp it's called because you have these towers of of rock and so this is where there's a rock face from which they cut these stone slabs and they would actually carry them down to the valley and up on the other side so the houses you see on the other side the older ones actually receive their roof from this area this house it really was a typical rusty core so now it's in it's called eremos santonofrio it means hermitage it comes from the greek eremos which means desert and that is connected with the 200s and 300s when some people desired a more rigorous life and so they went into the egyptian desert into the palestinian desert but this is the beginning of monasticism and the name eremol now means hermitage and you did you find some yeah this is good this is good okay guys so one of you has to do the cutting i only have one knife this is the problem with hermitages it only comes with one stuff of each and then just put them in here small place this is the guest reception area and sort of the living space the kitchen really is where it should be because you see the ledge down here this is where the manger for the cows was because this would be the stable there will be two cows maybe in a calf in here and this would be for the subsistence lifestyle this would be it so where you are sitting right now somebody would make and be very happy but they also got one of the only two windows in the entire building probably because people lived outdoors they just came in to sleep every window was just an opening where you would lose warmth and other things so you would have small windows you have four doors but just two windows i'm not sure always somebody lived up here my neighbor who is 70 years old he told me that when he was a boy herding goats in this area it was already ruined when i saw it it was on on the web i looked for for places to rent and the rent in three years would have just amounted to about 20 000 euros and for the same amount i bought a hut here so i had a few months in the summer to make it habitable and transform it into something that was usable for my purposes so we connected these rooms these were four separate rooms in this house so we connected them they did some work kicking out dirt because it was a third floor and so i wanted to have a similar floor what about the wall okay the wall part of the tragedy of this place is by the 1950s it was a ruin by the 1980s a tree was growing out of the kitchen and that's when a couple saw the place they bought it and they fixed it up so this wall is stone but just to close up any hole they just put cement on it and so i spent a lot of time trying to polish it because i wanted to restore the stone wall but not all of the stones are good stones so you have nice which is rather a cousin of granite and then you also have what the italians are called pietra morta stone is more fragile so as you try to get off the cement you're actually taking out the rock and you you have a structural problem with these rocks that have a good surface and lots of quartz so they're very sturdy but this would be a rock that is more fragile and it's impossible to get off the cement and so i decided to get some of the rocks back to appearance and then i put in lime plaster in between and the result is sort of reminiscent of my home was unintended but it in my area a lot of the farm houses are built with granite and in between the large granite rocks and bricks this is where they would put lime sort of it looks like an upper austrian farmhouse of my region let's just check on the chestnuts to be sure well there's something happening i'm going to give this to you but this will be still a bit hard all right that's not bad but i think we put it in again for just a few minutes so you don't use that too often i mean that's not really your stove working stove oh it is in the winter i use this one in the summer so i just have the hot plate but the oven i use throughout winter i usually cook soup for like five days and then just eat it for five days i'm a lazy cook but you made your own stove yeah i explored the concept of orchid stoves rocket mass heaters and then i found the design by an irishman and i adapted it to my needs so this is a combination of a rocket stove heater and so it has sort of an internal thing these are cast forms with a refractory material then i added just this their flues that sort of heat up i built it on jeep in austria you have a lot of these masonry heaters that are tiled and sort of the heart of the home is really that kind of stove where you sit and you you have your bag warmed and it's just it's radiant radiant heat is awesome but if you put your back against this thing this is nice and warm this is cob or it's the clay earth with sand we call it lame in german it's the best building material that i've ever worked with i mean first of all you feel like a kid playing with dirt and then you wash your hands and your hands are fine this is such a great material to work with i love it and i would do more with lom if i ever did anything again so i would be a cob house kind of guy the thing with this stove is i heat it once a day and it just stays warm for 18 hours it really conserves both wood and it's it's a really pleasant heat so the load you have outside the house of already about two years two years worth yeah so what you have in this corner is you have everything there handy for like say preparing a meal or what refrigerator do you have i do have a fridge i have to fridge outside to conserve energy because i heat this room we can we can have a look inside i have the toilet and shower i installed here this used to have an earthen floor when i came here and this used to be the door so it is that low so you would really be a very humble person to come in here and do whatever you had to do but i don't heat this room so i have the fridge here it conserves energy and it's storage for food the potato harvest is that your harvest this is my harvest yeah oh wow let's say winter comes and it gets really intense and you have to stay here some days or even weeks you are comfortable i'm comfortable i usually go even in the summer or in the winter i go to buy food only every two or three weeks and then i put everything in the backpack and i carry it up so what percentage of that food you want to grow yourself or you are already growing or in the summer my lunch and often dinner is just a salad from the garden in the winter it's it's what i have in storage some of the things that i can or jam some chestnuts have already been collected and then i i usually conserve them by making jam this is just chestnut jam you have snow shoes then so what's the winter time like i'm here on the southern slope so the snow that falls melts but we do get every now then just three feet of snow in one go you observe the weather report so you actually can say okay i should be going shopping now because in two days time it will be a lot more hassle to come up here and when there's a full path of snow and you have to fight your way up and then it takes me what usually i do in 40 minutes it takes me three hours it's just because it's it's cumbersome to walk in the snow even with snowshoes your washing machine is very small has to be fishy it's three kilos i think i used to hand wash but the family friend he fixes washing machines and he said you have to get one of these old if it's mechanic this is probably 30 years old i bought it for 50 bucks and for 40 i had it repaired and then i transported this on a trolley down from where i left my car i actually the fridge are transported on the bicycle the shower this is from material i reclaimed the ties to what they were for free so staying on the budget and working with things that i got all right for bed overs they're from a different tree it is very cozy but it's a home it is i tried to make it into a home i did the furniture and i'm not really an expert in this yeah what about this bread is it i didn't make this bread i do make bread here using the this i eat a lot of soup but of course i also eat a lot of pizza what is the verdict is it good so good but we can go up to the other multi-use area this is not what i expected it looks like an edit room i mean it is an editing hermitage yeah i guess because of my work has to do with media i came to the place not because i just wanted silence and be alone i brought work with me so because i came here to actually work on projects so the sleeping area is not very exciting my clothes are down there so this is the winter jacket and and stuff and so we have so i'm a diocesan priest i'm not a monk so my traditional color is black but when i went on my pilgrimage to jerusalem my bishop actually blessed a habit that was a pilgrim's outfit and so i use it as my sunday best in the hermitage all of the wood you see in here is large this was an empty room and i built in the sort of the roof structure but then i had problems with condensation and so i made holes and actually put in the solar air collector that is a solar air heater it now blows dry hot air during the winter inside and it pushes out moisture and so i actually get radiant heat from the top and it takes care of the condensation so these metal doors were put in by the previous owners so i had a glass door at least up here downstairs i couldn't do a glass door because everything is so low that even this is not a regular standard door the date here this is when it was either constructed or maybe rebuilt and so we come to the fourth room in this house this is maybe the heart of the whole place it's the chapel or oratory technically speaking so this is the space that is really dedicated to prayer and mass and everything this is sort of the choir stool you stand so sitting and a monastic kind of thing and then you can also sit down of course but the shape is really i had this room and here you see the the cement work on the stone wall that i had to deal with in the other parts of the house as well and so here i said okay so i have this room with an odd shape there's not a single straight wall and it's just a boring room and there is something beautiful about a vaulted ceiling and is it possible maybe to do it in wood and of course it's possible one of the biggest challenges in the rebuild of this house is that i came for three years not to work in the house but to work in the house so i had to really make the house habitable and it's suitable to my purpose within the first maybe three months i'm also just to say it a traditional priest so i celebrate the traditional latin mass here but this style is a mixture of byzantine romanesque and gothic i do like the symbolism of the ancient art even this this sort of vaulted ceiling partially tries to be something organic it's had a sort of a nature of a womb it has a nature of something where you can rest where you can it can be something that points upwards so it is abstract but it has sort of a direction how do you think the modern times can connect with this symbol i do not believe that making mass and or art in church to be contemporaneous in a sense that you try to imitate the world having a big like a concert or a disco kind of atmosphere you can draw people but the world is usually better in being the world than the church could ever be the church can just try to imitate the world but it's a weak imitation and it's not interesting i'm closing up the tomatoes here you keep it open during the day well it gets it gets like 35 degrees centigrade it just burns the potatoes and the night it gets five degrees so at the moment it's still not freezing but the plants are suffering sorry this is very steep strawberries yeah it's late of end of october but and we had 1200 meters but it's micro climates it's all the rage so it's this whole terraced hillside so it's it's only after my extension of the three years that i started putting some effort into the garden because i knew i could maybe stay longer and so i started the first order of business was to make this really steep slope more workable so i started building the stone terraces so these are the to have more straight workable areas but the second benefit is also that you create microclimates and so you try to get walls that have southern exposure because they heat up during the day and they give off the warmth and they can create a microclimate do you carry all the stone to build the terraces yes so i don't have a gym i just go about the woods and look for big rocks so something like this if i find it i'll just walk back with it and so i need about 150 to 200 stones to do a nice terrace it's a few trips that you work on the secret to building a good stone wall well it's first of all having really nice stones that can be easily stacked but you keep the best ones the flat ones and the heaviest ones for the top because the weight of the wall will take care of everything below so the stones that are not that nice i work them in at the bottom where you would think you build a good foundation and then build up from it but you actually the way it takes care of everything the stone terraces they make about a five degree centigrade difference so it makes a big difference for plants and whether they can survive in winter or not this is my ruth stout potato patch so this is really just old hay and and there are leaf that i put in but you take a lot of leaves that like maple that are quick to decompose and so i'll just bury the potatoes and they grow i don't put them in the earth so the stout method is basically you let it grow and so when you harvest them you don't have to clean them you just push the hay aside and you pick the potatoes so it's a very easy way it's a mantra in a lot of gardens is you have to build soil you're not really growing food you're growing soil and because of the hill be having a certain angle the snow doesn't keep here so even if you get a three feet of snow if it gets sunny again which it mostly is in winter a week afterwards this will be clean and so i have a different climate not only because of the walls but also because of the exposure which is the first step of trying to make a garden work at 1200 meters in the alps this is really it's a terrace that i just freshly made so i'm still building soil but then it was so empty that i just had to put something towards the end of the season but this is some cabbage and there's some salad and some other kohlrabi but they are cold tolerant they grow even in low temperatures so 10 degrees so during the day these will be growing then you have yoster berries and blackberries and gooseberries and spinach and this is charred and this also is called tolerant together with i don't know what you call this maybe green cabbage i don't know now here again is the attempt to do something which is maybe foolish at 1200 meters which is a victory yes we do see figs here it's the fig tree that is still left over from the previous owners and it's the first one together with this really large laurel up there which is a mediterranean kind of plant and it shouldn't be growing up here it was the first indication that i might get away with doing some things that are different zones microclimates it is in here these are the highest growing tomatoes in this valley probably on this mountain there is nobody else that tends a garden because nobody's living up here anymore try a cherry tomato and these are the koredi these are also very they have a lot of sugar content but here you actually see well the plants now have really suffered from the temperature shocks it's the end of the season last year i did the last big uh picking on the first of december and in the evening the first of december we got a foot of snow but then it warmed up again and so the cherry tomatoes the last ones are eight on the 26th of december which is insane for this region but the wall really heats up but i read up on i mean the russians for example when they cultivate citrus they develop techniques that you would train them to grow along the ground because near to the ground the temperature is higher it's just a centigrade that makes maybe the whole difference for the harvest whether the thing freezes or survives so it's it's these small things that's why microclimates are so you have enough produce for parts of the year that you don't have to shop probably yes i mean i guess you could do more you could always do more and i'm just beginning i've planted trees that will produce fruit only in a few years i have all of these potentially things that you can harvest at different times of the year how are you guys doing abby did you did you take out the other chestnuts okay i was doing a trek this summer and i met two americans from california and i said i live in a hermitage and so the young woman said ah great my father said i have to try and meet a hermit while i'm in europe it's like well if you don't come to the hermitage the hermit comes to you and there are still some late blooms and i recommend you to leave them because i still have bumble bees who are really excited but you can just and then she very properly observed well then he can't be a very good hermit because a hermit should be living in a hermitage which is very true but i i would say i'm a part-time hermit you might have noticed it so i have lizards living in these and so i didn't want to close them up and so this is the grotto de san giorgio because saint george was fighting the dragon so there's a dragon living in there there are two living in here so i made the monastero the sun is gone so the lizards are hiding away but in the morning you come out does it smell good this is probably the highest grown lavender certainly by a hermit it's it's it's the highest grown lavender by an austrian hermit in the italian alps most likely in this region it's all marketing right good

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 386,920

Rating: 4.9716644 out of 5

Keywords: hermitage, modern hermitage, modern hermit, catholic priest, monte viso, montviso, italian alps, johannes schwarz, mountaintop hermitage, mountain hermit, ruth stout garden, no work garden, no work potatoes, garden terraces, hillside terraces, microclimates, diy greenhouse, salvaged materials, val di angrogna, traditional latin mass, private chapel, homestead, mountaintop homestead, converted stable, abandoned home, mountainside cabin

Id: MF1jJy1F-8I

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021