Eglisau

Eglisau holds the north bank of the Rhine, in the district of Bülach, in the north of the canton of Zurich and close to the German border. The medieval core can still be read in the town plan, which is listed in the federal inventory of built sites of national importance worthy of protection. With barely more than five thousand inhabitants, the municipality has nonetheless kept the town rights it acquired in the Middle Ages: Eglisau belongs to the small group of Zurich country towns, with Elgg, Greifensee, Grüningen, Bülach and Regensberg, founded as fortified places by noble families and granted toll and market privileges.

Seen from the bridge, the town appears as a row of houses set right at the water's edge, wooden balconies painted red above the current, and an onion-domed tower closing the line. Above them the slope is planted with vines up to the forest edge; the vineyard marks the built landscape and still counts in the local economy. The Reformed church, first mentioned in 1254, was remodelled in 1715-1716 on a reduced version of St Peter's church in Zurich; its pre-Reformation choir has stayed in place, with late fifteenth-century Gothic frescoes. Downstream, the railway viaduct crosses the river over 440 metres: a 90-metre truss span in the middle, stone arches on either side — twelve on one, nine on the other, the southern approach describing a curve.

Today's river is no longer the earlier one. Between 1916 and 1920 the building of the dam, four kilometres downstream at the confluence with the Glatt, raised the water by 8.5 metres: the road bridge had to be demolished, as did the houses along the bank, and a new bridge was built in 1919 west of the old core. Navigation had already lost its economic base by the end of the nineteenth century, when the tolls disappeared and the railway arrived.

Why this place is remarkable

Eglisau is a town the Rhine made and then remade. It made it first as a crossing point: a road bridge is recorded here from the middle of the thirteenth century, and the town lived on transit, salt, fish and wine. It remade it between 1916 and 1920, when the reservoir raised the water level by 8.5 metres and erased the low bank with its houses and its bridge. What remains lies in that double reading: a town front that drops straight into the water, and behind it, on the slope, rows of vines that have not moved.

History and origin

The earliest traces of settlement in the municipal territory go back to the late Bronze Age, the tenth and ninth centuries BC: a fortified hilltop settlement on the Rhinsberg, uncovered by excavations of the University of Zurich and the cantonal archaeology service in 1998 and 1999, which brought to light a ring rampart on stone foundations. The oldest surviving mention of the hamlet of Seglingen dates from 892. The town itself was founded by the lords of Tengen, who held it until 1463, when it passed to baron Bernhard Gradner. It then became a Zurich bailiwick — 1489 according to the German Wikipedia, 1496 according to the French one — with its seat in a castle demolished in 1810.