At age 58, Stan Vanuytrecht decided to become a hermit.
After a lifetime as a survey technician, Vanuytrecht applied for a unique caretaker’s job: he is the lone and unpaid occupant of one of the last European hermitages.
Vanuytrecht lives in a 430-square-foot room as the official hermit of Saalfelden, Austria.
I need silence, time for prayer and contemplation,” Vanuytrecht said. “That’s what I have here plenty, every morning and evening, silence.”
The 350-year-old hermitage has no heat, power, or running water. He cooks on a wood stove, and showers in town when he does his twice-weekly shopping trip. He has to carry water 250 feet up the mountainside.
“I had planned to enter a Trappist monastery,” he explained. “My children and my parents could visit me there. But here I am only from May 1 until the end of October, and then I go back to Belgium. So they are actually happy to see me there, and also in summer when they holiday in Saalfeld. It is the best for my children and my parents.”
He isn’t alone the whole time.
People come to visit, to see the hermitage, and to pray.
He offers a glass of schnapps to visitors—and cake to children.
When they leave, he drifts back into silence.
Sitting on a bench, surveying the mountains, he seems a man at peace.
