The color of Austria is green. However red the national flag might be, the country is green. The Babenbergs, precursors to the Hapsburg dynasty, picked red for their coat of arms because it symbolized blood. The Hapsburgs maintained the color, but certainly didn't expand the empire through bloodshed.
History verifies that it worked. By the sixteenth century, the Hapsburgs controled most of the known world, including all the possessions of new Spain in the Western Hemisphere.
Looking at this landscape, how could it have been otherwise?
The Emperor Maximillian, known as the "last knight," loved the Tirolean landscape so much that he set up shop in Innsbruck. Although the residents of these breathtakingly beautiful Alpine valleys live in incomparable beauty, they are not to be trifled with, as Napolean learned in three separate battles. Andreas Hofer, the farmer who led the resistance, is an honored folk hero. But aggression outside of protecting home, hearth and family is as foreign to the spirit and atmosphere of this land as the pastoral scene above might suggest.
This is not artificial charm, as Disney might concoct. The Alps were there before humans, the church is really hundreds of years old, even the farm buildings next to the church are hundreds of years old. In this case, form follows function, and functionality in a natural setting like this is still beautiful.
