I'm in Tyrol, Austria right now, and it seems like every small town has a very similar small church. I have been in 4, and each has a year in the mid-1700s above its door. Each is Catholic and has beautiful, Rococo-style (I think) decorations inside. They often have onion domes.
Here is an example of one in Going am Wilden Kaiser, constructed in 1775: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Going-1.jpg Was this a particularly prosperous, peaceful time for the region? Was there strong pressure from the Catholic Church to build new places of worship? Were the small villages reaching sizes where they finally had enough resources to build churches?
Thank you in advance for any insights you may have.
Yay for Tyrol and thank you for an interesting question.
Most of those churches are probably from around 1740 to 1780 I'd wager. Incidentally, these are some of the most memorable dates in Austrian history since they are also the start and end year of the reign of Empress Maria Theresia, the last Habsburg.
Maria Theresia, like the whole House of Habsburg, was a devout Catholic. But not just privately, she actively sought to force religious unity unto her subjects. Besides being a rather severe antisemite, having attempted to expell all Jews from her Empire in 1745, she was also an enemy of Protestantism and had a good amount of Austrian Protestants moved to the scarcely populated eastern frontier, especially the Banat of Temeswar in today's western Romania more or less.
After her husband Francis I. died in 1765 her son Joseph II. became co-regent, which led to a lot of clashes in that regard since Joseph was very much a paragon of enlightenment and wanted religious tolerance. Eventually he managed to convince his mother to at least tolerate private Protestant worship in the Empire, until after her death, when he instituted his proper and widespread enlightened reforms (Josephinism) - including his Edict of Tolerance in 1782, which allowed and removed restrictions for Protestant and Orthodox Christians and made life much easier for most of the Jewish poplation.
During her lifetime the Empress also tried her best to promote Catholicism by financing all sorts of churches everywhere and indeed lots of small village and town churches stem from that period. The onion domes are typical architectural features of Austrian and Bavarian roccoco churches and not at all related to any Orthodoxy, just to prevent any confusion there.
A lot of those are also built by the same group of church architects. In Tyrol that would include Andreas Hueber (who also did Going from the OP's picture) and a big chunk of the Singer family dynasty, including Franz Singer, who from 1772 to 1775 led constructions for what is now considered one of the most beautiful roccoco churches in the southern German region: the Pfarrkirche Hl. Peter und Paul in Götzens near Innsbruck.
