Viennawalks: Four Intimate Walking Tours of Vienna's Most Historic and Enchanting Neighborhoods
304
Viennawalks: Four Intimate Walking Tours of Vienna's Most Historic and Enchanting Neighborhoods
304eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466865907 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
J. Sydney Jones is the author of books including The Empty Mirror, the first in the Viennese Mystery series, the nonfiction Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913, the guidebooks Viennawalks and Vienna Inside-Out, and the suspense novel Time of the Wolf. He currently lives near Santa Cruz, California.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Walk 1
The Stones of Vienna
Starting Point: Stephansplatz (St. Stephen's Square)
Public Transport: U1 subway to Stephansplatz
Vienna is a crazy quilt of history. Entire epochs are delineated by building styles from the baroque to the concrete-and-glass towers of modern times, and these styles may well be sewn together to form the fabric of one city block. This may be confusing at first for the visitor, but once the pattern is understood, these blocks become a walk through time.
Vienna is also an archaeological tell awaiting excavation. Walking Vienna is as much a vertical as it is a horizontal pursuit, from church steeples towering above the city to excavations and catacombs under the streets.
Ruskin told the story of Venice through her stones. A similar tale is to be gleaned from Vienna's stones, both above and below ground. During the course of this first tour we will uncover the origins of Vienna, from her beginnings two thousand years ago as the Roman outpost Vindobona (remains of which are to be found under the Hoher Markt) through the turbulent and very dark Dark Ages to the Middle Ages.
But at the same time, this and the other walks in this book are much more than a walk through time. We will be walking as well through the byways of a vibrant and thriving European city, one of the last truly European cities on this excessively Americanized continent. There is an entire way of life to experience on these walks, a way of life that is not a museum piece or a quaint stage-setting for tourists. Vienna is its citizens and their daily routines as much as it is its fine buildings and ornate history. A student of life as much as I am a student of history and architecture, I will try always to keep each aspect in proper perspective, hoping sometimes even to successfully blend them into the amazing mélange that a day in the life of Vienna always is. The qualities of the grapes grown in the vicinity of Vienna take on as much importance as the human qualities of the men and women who have played decisive roles in the city's development; the shop front of a corner grocery can be as engrossing as a Gothic steeple.
This first tour begins at the Stephansplatz in front of the cathedral, St. Stephen's (Stephansdom, Stephanskirche, St. Stephans, or simply "der Steffl," as the Viennese refer to both their cathedral and its staggering southern tower). For the 1.6 million-plus inhabitants of Vienna, this of all sights is considered the center of the city, both spiritually and geographically. Since construction originally began in the twelfth century, St. Stephen's has been completely rebuilt three times, the last after its destruction by German artillery in 1945. Architectural styles from the Romanesque to baroque are incorporated in the cathedral as are stones from the old Roman wall and wood from the forests of the Vienna Woods. St. Stephen's has witnessed marriages — such as the famous double wedding in 1515 that won for the Habsburgs both Hungary and Bohemia, and Haydn's, Mozart's, and Johann Strauss's — as well as burials. Until the eighteenth century, thousands of Viennese were buried in the catacombs under the church in the days when Stephansplatz was the churchyard-cemetery. Inside the catacombs, which are open to the public, piles of bones provide a chilling physical testament to the history of Vienna. The viscera of the Habsburgs are still stored there in simple urns (their hearts are in St. Augustine's Church, and their wax-filled corpses are to be found in the crypt of the Kapuzinerkirche, the Capuchin Church).
St. Stephen's has survived invasion, plague, and occupation. Bullet scars from the 1848 revolution and fire damage from the 1945 conflagration are both visible on the inside walls.
It is not then a matter of arbitrary guidebook kitsch that prompts me to begin these walking tours of Vienna in front of a cathedral. St. Stephen's is a metaphor, in sandstone, of Vienna and the Viennese. Just as St. Stephen's is a mishmash of architectural styles that oddly blend to a harmonious whole, so the Viennese themselves are a jumble of races and peoples, a true melting pot of Europe. Just as the cathedral has managed to survive the centuries, carrying an air of grace into a largely graceless century, so too have the Viennese fortwurstelt (muddled through) the changing times with a surprising degree of elegance.
Facing the cathedral we go around the right side, the southern side. Just past the side door we come to the base of the tower. For a nominal fee you can climb up 343 of its 418 steps to the observation tower, but I advise against counting each step. There are some excellent views to be had on the way up through the slit windows. Such windows, so reminiscent of those in a fortress, tell the story of the medieval church, which was as much fortress as place of worship.
Near the top we come to the belfry, now empty, which before 1945 held the Pummerin (Boomer: its real name was Josephine, after Emperor Joseph I, but the Viennese are quite nickname-happy and generally are stubborn about any sobriquets they may have created). At 17,000 kilos, the Pummerin was one of the largest bells in the world; it was cast in 1711 from Turkish cannon captured in the siege of 1683. Eight men were needed to pull its 813-kilo clapper. It fell in the 1945 fire and was destroyed, but a new monster bell weighing more than 20,000 kilos was cast from parts of it and other bells damaged in the flames and now hangs in the lower northern tower on the other side of the cathedral. One other difference as well: this new bell is electrically rung.
So, not many more steps and we are up in the observation room of the southern tower. (We could have taken the easy way up and used the lift on the northern tower, but we would have only a 180-degree view of the city; the view from the southeast to southwest is blocked by the roof of the cathedral.)
On this observation floor there are four windows, one for each direction of the compass. First, go to the Ostfenster (east window) to the immediate left of the stairs. This isn't necessarily the best view of the city, but it affords a fine peek at this city of contrasts. Prominent in the distance are the smokestacks of the oil-refining yards near the airport at Schwechat. And in the middle distance is the greenery of Stadtpark, one of the city's many internal greenbelts. Industry and love of nature; they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The city limits of Vienna encompass an area (granted it is a large area, stretching outside of the built-up areas) consisting of a startling two-thirds portion set aside as open space. Half of this greenery is actually used agriculturally (think of the vineyards circling the city) and the other half has been set aside as woods and gardens for recreational purposes. The Vienna Woods fall into this second category.
To the far left from this east window, at about ten o'clock, is another long strip of green: the Prater, formerly an imperial hunting refuge, now an amusement park and public gardens.
Keeping to the middle distance, track across the view to the right to about one o'clock to the green dome (corroded copper) of the Salesianerkirche; behind this church Prince Metternich, that nineteenth-century precursor of Kissinger, built his palace. This area is still known as Embassy Row. Just to the right of this point, at two o'clock, is the beginning of the long expanse of lawn leading up to the Oberes (Upper) Belvedere — as opposed to the Unteres (Lower). Eugene of Savoy, one of the saviors of Vienna during the seventeenth-century Turkish siege, commissioned the famous baroque architect Hildebrandt to design this summer seat. The lower tract was a residence, the magnificent upper building that we see at the end of the lawns was the reception hall. (Just to be fair to the most famous architect of his day, Eugene's city palace was built by Hildebrandt's rival, Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, on the Himmelpfortgasse.)
The composer Bruckner died in the gate house of the Upper Belvedere; Archduke Ferdinand and his morganatic wife Sophie departed from it on their (and the world's) fateful journey to Sarajevo. The Upper Belvedere is now used as a museum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Austrian painting, housing such greats as Waldmüller, Klimt, Schiele, and Kokoschka.
Now, follow the warren of chimneys, red-tiled roofs, and courtyards toward the foreground, into the Inner City, or First District. The streets curve pleasantly and unexpectedly in baroque and Renaissance fancy: no right angles here. These are streets that were laid out for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages and not for the automobile.
At about two o'clock in the foreground is the green cupola of the steeple of the Franciscan Church, Franziskanerkirche, on the intimate square of the same name. Then, closer to Stephansdom itself, at three o'clock in the extreme foreground, is the steeple of the Deutschordenskirche and the peaceful courtyard of this military and Hospitaler order. Both Mozart and Brahms lived here for short times.
Looking closer to the foreground now, all around the rear of Stephansplatz we can see the baroque and Renaissance houses of this quiet quarter. We can also see part of the east roof of the church of St. Stephen's and the ornate scalloping of the roof tiles.
The next window on your right as you face the east window is the Südfenster, the "south window." Immediately the eye travels to the biggest object in sight, the green dome and twin pillars of the Karlskirche, St. Charles's Church, a huge and ornate gift of the baroque age.
To the right of this church, at twelve o'clock in the middle distance, is the oblong green roof of the Vienna State Opera, Staatsoper, which is as much a symbol of Vienna as is St. Stephen's. Ironically enough, the Opera too was destroyed in 1945 during Allied bombing raids on the city.
Out in the distance now we can see the rolling hills of the Wienerwald, Vienna Woods (or, more properly, Wold). The woods ring the city from the southwest to the northwest, ending at the Danube, providing the green lungs of Vienna. Saved from development in the late nineteenth century, they are Vienna's greenbelt.
In the middle distance, at two o'clock, are two strange reminders of World War II. What look like ungainly water towers or concrete building blocks laid down by a giant are Flaktürme, flak towers left over from insane Nazi "fortress Vienna" thinking. Thick ten-foot walls would protect the last-ditch fighters of the Third Reich. They were built to last, at any rate. Blasts strong enough to demolish them would also destroy surrounding buildings. So here they still stand, grim reminders of a world out of joint. The one farther to the left is known as Das Haus des Meeres: an aquarium has been built into its walls, utilizing their thickness for something other than air-raid protection.
Just in front of these twin flak towers, like bizarre clones (though actually almost a century older), are the twin brownish domes of the Museum of Fine Art and Natural History Museum on the Burgring. And just in front of these museums, closer to the foreground, is the great green expanse of the roofs of the Hofburg, the city palace-fortress of the Habsburgs for more than six centuries. A mini-city in itself, the Hofburg was built in stages through all those centuries.
Just to the right of the roofs of the Hofburg we can see the graceful spire of the Michaelerkirche, St. Michael's Church, facing the main entrance to the Hofburg. And in the extreme right foreground just beneath us is the street known as Graben running off its short distance to the right. Once part of the western defenses of the Roman fortress of Vindobona, which was built on this site in the first century A.D., the street was a moat in the Middle Ages (Graben means moat or ditch). The street leading off to the left from the base of Graben is Kärntnerstrasse, the Broadway of Vienna, the ancient route to Corinthia.
The next window going clockwise is the Westfenster, from which you look directly out over the twin western Pagan Towers (which you will have the chance to examine in detail in Walk 2) and the ornately tiled roof of St. Stephen's to the oldest quarter of Vienna, site of the Roman camp of Vindobona. In the middle ground at eleven o'clock is the stump of the tower of the Minoritenkirche, Church of the Minorites; in the center of the middle ground is the green dome of Peterskirche and just beyond that are the tall spires of the Rathaus, built by the same architect who restored the southern tower we are now standing in, both done during the nineteenth century. These spires lumber heavenward with the heavy burden of city government. In front of the Rathaus we can just make out the peaked roof and rounded window of the Burgtheater, one of the premier stages of the German-speaking world.
Both of these last two buildings are on the Ringstrasse, itself the product of that same mid-nineteenth-century building boom which created the Opera, Stadtpark, and other monumental projects when the old city walls were destroyed. To the left of the Rathaus, just behind the steeple of St. Michael's and a dome of the Hofburg, is the Hellenic Parliament building, also on the Ring.
In the middle ground at twelve o'clock are the twin, neo-Gothic spires of the Votivkirche, Votive Church, built to celebrate Kaiser Franz Joseph's survival of a clumsy assassination attempt. Beyond these spires the huge glass and concrete home of the new General Hospital are to be glimpsed, and directly to the right is the ultra-modern glass shell of a new municipal building. The contrast here could not be greater between Alt Wein, the old "charming" picture of Vienna (even though, as with the Votivkirche, it is only a nineteenth-century legacy), and modern-day Vienna, both striving for pride of place. And in the distance, on the slopes of the Vienna Woods, we can make out the plots of vineyards that have been here for thousands of years, dwarfing by their subtlety all these grandiose architectural statements.
Now look over the right-hand Pagan Tower to the delicately filigreed steeple in the middle ground. This is the steeple of Maria am Gestade, the Church of Our Lady of the Riverbank, actually situated on what used to be an arm of the Danube that at one time formed a natural defense to the northwest. The steeples of Vienna are not just handy landmarks; they are symbols of the history of the city writ in miniature. With Maria am Gestade, for example, we have a church that was built on the foundations of an old Roman temple. The roots of this church come from the earliest beginnings, then, of Vienna as a city. Its steeple, defiant in its ornate design, was destroyed in both Turkish sieges and in the Napoleonic Wars. The Viennese rebuilt it each time. In 1945, it fell victim again and was once more rebuilt.
Another bearer of history is far out the right-hand side of the window in the middle ground (or in the far left-hand side of the next window): the stocky, square tower of Ruprechtskirche, St. Rupert's Church, built on a little knoll over the Danube Canal, Vienna's oldest church, and built on Vienna's oldest square.
Moving to the north and last window, we can see clearly now to the far left in the distance the last slopes of the foothills of the Alps (locally known as the Vienna Woods) as they are terminated by the Danube River. We can just make out the white outlines of the Josefskirche on the right-hand slope, the Kahlenberg. It was on this slope that the Celts, masters of this area for seven centuries before the advent of the Romans in the first century, built their Oppida, or hilltop fortress-town. Before the Celts there were other Stone Age peoples. Settlements have surely been there since the days of Neanderthal man. First the Stone Age peoples came as nomadic hunters and later settled to farm the fertile land near the river. There must have been a high level of culture attained by these early Stone Age peoples, if we judge by grave findings alone. The amazing Venus of Willendorf, which is now to be seen in all her full-breasted and full-thighed glory at the Natural History Museum, was a product of these 20,000-year-old settlements. And it is amazing — if indeed we take the Venus as a mother-goddess figure — how long this one "Viennese" impulse has lasted: down until today with the cult of the Madonna of Catholic Vienna.
But the Celts were the first known inhabitants of what we now know of as the Vienna area. To them we owe the name: from the Celtish Vindobona (white place: most probably referring to the manner in which the waters of the Danube churned at this spot) the Romans adopted this name (accenting it on the second syllable, Celtic style), which later generations made Wien (or its latinization as we in English know the name, Vienna). The Celts mined iron ore in the mountains to the south and salt in the mountains to the west, in the Salzkammergut (salt crown land). Salzburg (salt castle) owes its name to this ancient salt trade.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Viennawalks"
by .
Copyright © 1985 J. Sydney Jones.
Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Map,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Information and Advice,
Before You Go,
General Information,
Accommodations,
Transportation,
Entertainment,
Food and Drink,
Tipping,
Telephone, Telegraph, and Post Office,
Money and Banking,
Shopping,
Dress,
Safety in the Streets,
Emergencies,
Other Sights of Interest,
Glossary,
Chronology,
Walk 1: The Stones of Vienna,
Walk 2: Vienna Gloriosa,
Walk 3: Noble Vienna,
Walk 4: Fin de Siècle Vienna,
Restaurants, Cafés, and Shops,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Adcard,
Copyright,