Bavarian house where Pope born still for sale.


The Bavarian farmhouse where Pope Benedict was born
has not yet been sold despite multi-million dollar offers
from around the world to its owner, who wants to move out
to escape being besieged by tourists.

A spokeswoman for Claudia Dandl, a German woman who
bought the 260-year-old house for a reported 170,000 euros

(August 31) that said she had made a deal to sell the house
to the Roman Catholic church.

"At the moment nothing has been decided and it's all
still open," a spokeswoman for Dandl told Reuters, denying
the report in Die Welt daily that the therapist had agreed
to sell to the Munich archdiocese.

"Six contestants are in the race who are offering
between two and five million (euros)," spokeswoman Victoria
Rauh said, adding "I would guess that it will take another
three to four weeks until a decision has been made" for the
15-room house just off the central square of the village of
Marktl am Inn near the Austrian border.

Rauh noted that Dandl has expressed a wish that the
house be sold to an organisation linked to the church.

"We have always said that we'd like to see this house
in public hands or managed by the church because it would
ensure the dignity and the importance associated with the
Pope," Marktl mayor Hubert Gschwendtner told Reuters
Television.

Villagers in the tiny birthplace of Joseph Ratzinger
greeted his election as Pope with unbridled joy in April
and have hosted a stream of pilgrims to the birthplace of
the man who became Benedict XVI.

Ratzinger's birth on April 16, 1927 is marked by a
plaque on Dandl's house, across the street from the town
hall. His family stayed in Marktl for another two years
before moving on.

Dandl, 39, extensively renovated the house, built in
1745. She said she now wants to sell it so that she and her
two young children can have ordinary lives again and stop
being pestered by tourists.

Many ring her doorbell, knock on the door or peer
inside, prompting her to turn off the bell and put drapes
over the windows. She has said some tourists even got
aggressive and that she feared for her children's safety.

Local officials have expressed hope that the faded
centuries-old village, with a population of 2,700, would
get a badly needed economic lift from Ratzinger's papacy.