Ternberg, Austria—Three communities took part in a Peace Road event organized by UPF of Upper Austria together with community officials.
The event of June 22, 2019, involved bicycling between the communities of St. Ulrich near Steyr, Ternberg and Reichraming.
This time the Peace Road was run as a rally and started from two places simultaneously. One group gathered in front of the Peace Memorial in St. Ulrich, the second group in front of the Peace Bridge in Reichraming.
They stopped in front of the Waldensians Memorial. (Six hundred years ago, the Waldensians, an ascetic Christian movement, were sentenced to death by fire or to life imprisonment because of their faith.)
The two groups cycled about 20 kilometers (almost 12.5 miles) to meet in Ternberg at the memorial site of a subcamp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, where they were received by the mayor of Ternberg.
This year‘s Peace Road event was held under the theme “Detoxification of Language.” After all the cyclists had arrived in Ternberg, the internationally awarded author Anna Mitgutsch gave a lecture on the topic “The Path to Peace Leads over Language.”
She showed the importance of language in the process of consciousness. “The language is a highly sensitive instrument, which must not be misused with impunity. … Whoever changes the language, changes thinking and thus clears the way for acting.”