Mary in the Fir, the miraculous image of Triberg

Around the year 1644, above the little town of Triberg, on a rough rock facing the setting sun, grew a great fir tree. A narrow footpath ran past it from Triberg to Schonach, and close beside it a fresh spring welled up from the hard rock. A hand unknown to this day had fastened a graceful image of the Virgin to the tree, painted on parchment and pinned in place. Wind and rain soon tore it down, and snow and fir needles covered it until no one saw it any more.

A girl of about seven from Triberg, Barbara Franz by name, passed by with her mother and spied the image among the leaves. She lifted it from the mud, kissed it, and would not stop begging and weeping until her mother allowed her to carry the little picture home, together with its small tin box. At home the child venerated it in a wall niche above the table, as at a tiny children’s altar.

But on the third day Barbara was struck by so fierce an eye ailment that the neighbours feared certain blindness. Her desperate parents placed all their trust in God. Then a voice in a dream promised the child healing if she hung the image once more on the great fir by the spring. So it happened, and Barbara grew well. She lived long and died only in the year 1717.

A year later, in 1645, a second miracle occurred. The sixty-eight-year-old tailor Friedrich Schwab suffered from leprosy, a disease from which the people of that age recoiled. He took refuge at the image on the fir and washed himself with the water of the spring, and he was freed of his affliction. In gratitude he had a small statue of the Virgin carved from linden wood and set it in the hollow of the tree, where the parchment image had hung before.

This statue now became the true miraculous image, and to it the devotion belonged. It was protected with a little wooden roof and an iron ring from which an offering box hung. At first many of the faithful came to the tree to pray and give thanks.

With the years, however, the flow of visitors fell away. The wooden roof decayed, the iron ring cracked, and the offering box was broken open several times. The fir grew on, and its bark began slowly to enclose the little statue. For nearly fifty years the image stood almost forgotten in the forest, a mound of moss and bark by the lonely path, while war and hardship crossed the Black Forest.

Only in 1692 did life return to the tree. In the War of the Palatine Succession, soldiers were quartered in the region. On a December evening three Tyrolean soldiers were walking from Triberg to Schonach when an unusual, wondrously sweet singing surrounded them, which they took for a true song of angels. At their lodging on the Rohrhardsberg they learned that a Triberg miller had experienced the same years before, and that a statue of the Virgin stood nearby.

The soldiers went in search and found the image half enclosed by bark. Deeply moved, they set a window before it and a protective roof with the inscription Sancta Maria, patrona militum, ora pro nobis, holy Mary, patroness of soldiers, pray for us. A fourth soldier, Gabriel Maurer, fell so gravely ill in his limbs in 1694 that he could walk only on crutches. With great effort he made his pilgrimage to Maria in der Tanne and vowed to enter the Capuchin order. On the way home he fell asleep, and when he woke he felt a cracking in his limbs and rose without crutches, healed.

From then on the people streamed in. In 1697 the pilgrimage was approved and a stone chapel built, which was replaced between 1699 and 1705 by the present church. Its carvings were made by the Schupp family of sculptors from Villingen. Maria in der Tanne still stands above the Bergsee, within sight of the waterfalls that, since 2022, have earned Triberg the name Wasserfallstadt, the waterfall town.