Oswald of Northumbria: An English Saint in the Alps

Outside Bad Kleinkirchheim, a small and remote Alpine spa resort in Carinthia, is a hamlet called Sankt Oswald. It is named after the dedicatee of its church, the seventh-century English king and early Christian saint, Oswald of Northumbria. There is also a small chapel dedicated to Oswald on the other side of the valley, next to the stream that bears his name. And if you follow the stream up into the mountains you come to the Oswaldeck, a promontory that looks over the valley (if you squint, you might even spot the St Oswald water treatment plant). The pervasive presence of an English saint in a remote Austrian valley might seem surprising, but this Sankt Oswald is not an isolated case. There are more than 200 churches dedicated to Oswald of Northumbria, which makes him one of the most popular English saints. Yet well over half of those churches are not in the British Isles, and the majority of continental churches dedicated to him are concentrated in the southern part of the German-speaking world. This is surprising.