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As you might suspect from its Celtic name, Brixen is one of the oldest settlements in the Tyrolean lowlands. A Celtic axe from the late Bronze Age that was found in Brixen, today adorns Brixen im Thale’s village coat of arms.
If we examine the names of the communities in the Brixen Valley, with most of them it is easy to recognize their original meaning, in the case of Hopfgarten, Westendorf, Kirchberg, for example. Here we are dealing with German names that date back to the Bavarian settlers.
From the Tiberius and Drusus campaign in 15 BC until Bavarian settlement, which began in the 6th century, the Brixen Valley belonged to the Roman Empire, whose language was Latin. However, Latin helps us explain the name Brixen just as little as German does.
The first settlers in Brixen were Celts and they appeared in the middle of the first century before Christ, predominantly at the edges of the Alps. In the second century before Christ, a Celtic Kingdom, with the capital Noreia, emerged in the Eastern Alps region. They went into action as Regnum Noricum against the Romans. North-east Tyrol also belonged to this empire.
Old
Church
Stories
Historians had assumed for a very long time that the Brixen im Thale parish church was a significant parochial building on ancient sacral grounds. Brixen is also the only village in the Brixen Valley which appears in the "Indiculus Arnonis" and confirms the naming there of an "ecclesia ad prixina". This is evident due to the historical settlement and manorial system development of this region: Brixen is beyond doubt the oldest and genuine mother-parish of the valley, which once encompassed the entire market cooperative district. To the west its borders meet in the then still unsettled, woody Enge von Hopfgarten with those of the equally old parish of Kirchbichl, and to the East at Klausenbach with those of St. Johann in Tirol, the mother-church of the Leuken Valley.
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