Year after year, the rafts are re-tied together on the Drau. Rafting, the transport of logs, is now on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. In addition to the knowledge of Lipizzaner breeding, the cultural technique that has been cultivated for centuries has recently been awarded.
There is a long tradition of tying rafts on the Drau. Rafting goes back to the Middle Ages. The rafts once transported goods as far as the Black Sea. Nowadays raft trips are organized mainly for tourists. Now rafting, in which logs are tied together and pushed or pulled down a river, has received international recognition and has been placed on UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The joy among the rafters, such as the Spittal-Baldramsdorf rafters group or the Kraftholz group, is great.International association of raftersAn international association of active rafters from Austria, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Spain and the Czech Republic has campaigned for recognition. In order to operate rafting, which has now been honored as a cultivated cultural technique, several components are required: on the one hand, manual skills and construction knowledge. On the other hand, lots of practical experience in terms of navigation and water currents in the often raging rivers.Keeping old knowledge aliveIn Austria, rafting is mainly practiced along the Drau. Every year, six towns in Carinthia build a raft and travel through the last Austrian stretch of the river. The aim behind this is to keep the old knowledge of rafting alive. The Drau was an important west-east connection in Carinthia up until the 20th century. From the 17th century it was considered the “Carinthian wood route” for sawmills and later cellulose factories. Logs and sawn timber, iron products and other goods were transported down the Drau on rafts from Upper Carinthia.
source site-12