Church

HIGH RISK: in Bavarian village life the parish church (Pfarrkirch) is the literal, physical center of communal identity, marked yearly by the Kirchweih/Kirwa festival (the church’s consecration anniversary, one of the most important traditional Bavarian folk festivals); ‘Kirch’ therefore defaults overwhelmingly to the building and parish institution, arguably even more concretely than standard German ‘Kirche’. The natural dialect word for a gathered community, ‘Gmoa’, is unusable here because it is monopolized by the secular-municipality sense.