History
This fresko from the 14th century is to be found in the Vigilius Chapel on the Kalvarien Mountain in Bolzano. It pictures the medieval castle of Weineck, a path, a gate and an estate at the beginning of the path. It is to be assumed, that the displayed estate is today's Thurnhof, which was already mentioned in the 12th century in a deed of gift.In the Middle Ages, Thurnhof was owned by the Bavarian monasteries of Schäftlarn and Rottenbuch. They used to send their monks there every autumn for the harvest and wine making. As the Kaiser of Hapsburg Joseph II closed down many monasteries due to his efforts to separate the state from the church, the Turnhof- estate was given to religious funds.
One of our ancestors, Franz Mumelter, bought the estate in the mid- 19th century. He was a descendent of the Besenbinder estate close to today's Bolzano railway station. The estate fell victim to the construction of the rails and Mumelter took the name "Besenbinder" with him. For this reason, even today many people in Bolzano would refer to our estate as Besenbinderhof rather than Thurnhof. At the beginning of the 20th century the family run a successful wine tavern.
Only in the 1930s, with the marriage of Maria Mumelter and Hans Berger from Gries, the lastname Berger was introduced. After serious bomb destructions in the second world war, the estate was rebuild in the late 1940s.
