For more than 300 years Christoph Carl Fernberger, an Upper Austrian nobleman born around 1598, was hardly known to anyone. At the end of the 1960s this changed when his unusual travel diary was discovered in the Palais Harrach in Vienna. In 1621, initially involuntarily, he became Austria's first world traveller.
Believing to go to Venice, the ship, which he boarded after a short war captivity in Amsterdam, headed directly for West Africa. Illness, death and shipwreck accompanied this journey, which lasted 7 years and was to lead him across the globe to Southeast Asia (and back again).
Recently, this uniqueness has been joined by another one. Fernberger‘s travel book contains the only records of a short war between the kingdoms of Ayudhya and Patani (both in today's Thailand) in the years 1624/25. In this program Helmut Lukas talks about Christoph Carl Fernberger's amazing journey, about journeys in the 17th century in general, about communication possibilities and difficulties, about the armed conflict between Raja Ungu's kingdom of Patani and Songtham, the king of Siam/Ayudhya, but also about the image of women at that time, since Patani was ruled by women for more than 125 years.
Broadcast design: Doris Bauer (Responsible for the programme content)
Interview with: Univ. Doz. Dr. Helmut Lukas, Department of Social Anthropology at the Academy of Sciences. He has been conducting research in Southeast Asia for several decades and is the editor of the forthcoming
publication: Christoph Carl Fernberger: The First Austrian in Patani and Ayudhya (1624-1625). Tri-lingual (German-English-Thai) annotated edition of Fernberger’s diary concerning his stays in Ayudhya & Patani in the years 1624 & 1625. Centre for European Studies at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. Co-editor: Charit Tingsabadh. Speaker: Walther Moser
Further publication: Wernhart, Karl Rudolf: Christoph Carl Fernberger, Der erste österreichische Weltreisende 1621-1628. Completely revised and newly commented edition. With additional commentary for Indonesia and Southeast Asia by Helmut Lukas; Series: Reiseforschung, Vol. 2, 1st edition 2011, 2nd edition, 2012, 168 pages.
Music: Krayne - Dance of the Zen Master; Zaire - Isla de Java; Senyawa - Warna; SaReGaMa - One Thousand And One Nights. Available at Free Music Archive and Jamendo, a community for free, legal and unlimited music, published under Creative Commons licenses.