Examples are: Vuissen FR surrounded totally by VD, Celigny GE surrounded by VD and lake, and part of the district of Broye-Vully VD surrounded by FR and lake, among possible others.
Does anyone know the story behind the cantonal enclaves of Switzerland? Or a resource I can read about why are they like this?
It's not exactly a tough Googling exercise...
Did I miss something or there is nothing mentioning the story behind the exclaves in that page?
Wikipedia seems to have a good write up of them. You have to find the list of exclaves and enclaves then click on the ones you are interested in.
Vuissen I would think because Freiburg bought it in 1598, then highly likely since it's most usual in those days add a little difference in how god should be worshipped and it never returned and always stayed in Freiburg's possession.
I have done these things. Wikipedia doesn't help. Not even in French in the cases I checked.
Speaking of enclaves, and how such a mess they can become...
Baarle-Hertog
https://www.google.ch/maps/place/Baa...832!4d4.931736
The map is of the Netherlands, the red parts are all Belgium, however inside the Belgium enclaves there's a bunch of Dutch counter-enclaves.
All the result of lord and dukes trading, selling and conquering in the past, which is very highly likely also the story behind almost every enclave in Switzerland.
Since both countries use their own numbering of the houses it is normal for streets to have houses with duplicate addresses, meaning there's two houses with the same number in the same street, and some houses and stores even are build on one of the many borders with the living room in the Netherlands, and their kitchen in Belgium.
You're probably going to have to read the history of each one. But generally speaking these villages were owned, sold, conquered, swapped etc and the religion of the owner determined which canton they decided to be attached to...
Very broadly speaking.
Céligny for example, the owner went Protestant so it stayed with Geneva while the Crans was owned by Catholics.
The invasion of Bern also comes into play. But it's still mostly about who was or who ended up owner.
After that, the communes can vote to change cantons if they want. As the Swiss (mostly*) don't love to change anything set in the 1500s... we still have these enclaves.
*moutier is special.
I once read about one monastery built on the border. I think it's one of the Trappist monasteries famous for their beer, but I can't remember which. Apparently it was built during the period of religious persecution. The church part was on the Belgian side so technically the monks were not breaking any laws by attending Catholic mass, whereas the graveyard was on the Dutch side as the monks couldn't bare the though of being buried in foreign soil.
No, no at all. It took half a century for Moutier.
Campione (and San Martino, which no-one knows how/when it reverted to CH) in Ticino, Bussingen in in SH.
Tom
Before nationalism like we mean today was even a concept, nobles, cities and clergy owned different lands, often not contiguous, and sold them among themselves.
Germany in 1789 is a pretty good example of extreme fragmentation https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...2C_1789_en.png
Some of this stuff still exists today in countries like Switzerland because the federal gov't and the cantons cannot force land swaps, only the locals can decide.
The situation in the UAE is also a mess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirat...UAE_en-map.png
and there's another case of second order enclave like the belgian one, with a sharja emirate territory inside an omani exclave. I guess it's due to fairly recent tribal allegiances.
The solothurner exclaves in basel landschaft were sold to solothurn city.
This map of religions in Switzerland is a good indicator of the importance of the religious motivation in the formation of the enclaves:
It also worked the other way around I guess, your lord embraces the reformation so you, a stupid peasant who doesn't understand anything because mass was in latin, convert as well. It's very intertwined.
In places like Easter Europe it gets even more complicated because identity is not just religious but linguistic. So you got people switching languages because their overlord thought some other language was more civilized. Some even switched surnames. And then some centuries later somebody else came along and thought, because they speak this language they must be this ethnicity. As a result, especially in former Yugoslavia, people have been murdering one another until very recently.
Even tho i've heard the story been told before, it does not take in account that a Belgium / Netherlands border was non existing during the periods of reformation and persecution. (due to the fact Belgium did not exist yet)
Looked it up, and only Achel is close to the current border, but they did not make beer till 1859, by which time already that whole area by long was Catholic and for certain no persecution of catholics in that area.
It's a nice story, but without a real source with actual trustworthy facts, I deem it a fairytale.
a very valid point.
On the other hand, the enclave of Campione in Ticino is due to towns being owned by different catholic bishops with different rules, which is also why we have four more days of carnival than some other parts of Ticino and other catholic areas.
Tom
So clearly they can.
It's a little known fact, but there's a 120 square mile enclave of Glarus on the moon!
Just before the launch of Apollo 18, the Swiss-American astronaut Fridolin Rhyner secreted a number of small pebbles from Toedi in his thermal space underpants. These had been blessed by both the Roman Catholic and Evangelical Reformed clergy of Glarus with the special intention of founding a Glarner colony in space, to follow on from the incredible success of their previous colony in Wisconsin .
Upon arrival on the moon, Commander Rhyner made some excuse about having to relieve himself and wandered off to cast the stones in a modest circle of about 20 square metres. Unfortunately for his plans - but fortunately for the canton - he'd forgotten to take the reduced gravity of the moon into account and the stones flew much further than he intended, resulting in an enclosed patch of moon dust of about 120 square miles.
Under an ancient federal law dating back to the 14th century, the relatively large size of the enclave meant that the land would not only remain part of the canton of Glarus "in perpetuity", but Commander Rhyner and his descendants would have grazing and logging rights which could be shared with his fellow Glarners according to regulations established at the next Landsgemeinde.
The bigwigs at NASA were furious, but there wasn't much that could be done about the colony as its existence was legally binding and within weeks the first Glarner farmers had moved in, building houses, chopping down the lunar forests and grazing their somewhat bemused cattle on the thin, infertile soil.
Indeed, it was argued that the traditional description of the moon as being made of "green cheese" could be seen as a prophecy of the Glarner colonisation of the planet, being a clear reference to the traditional "Schabziger" cheese of the canton, which the farmers promptly began to make. The Americans found the notion of another nation - not to mention, such a small nation - speaking of "Manifest Destiny" hard to stomach, but soon learnt to hold their tongues when they were threatened with Schabziger on their Mac n cheese.
So that's how Glarus got an enclave on the moon. Next week I'll tell you how they managed to claim the entire galaxy of Andromeda for the canton.
[](https://www.englishforum.ch/attachments/other-general/128671d1504110526-story-behind-cantonal-enclaves-glarner-astronaut.jpg)