Stephansdome

August 17th

The cathedral of St. Stephens has been my favorite ever since I first visited Vienna in 2004, so being back around the historic city center was something like going to visit an old friend, albeit a little bit older than most of my “old friends”. Something about the imposing nature of the architecture set so closely with the surrounding city gives the feeling of indomitable power, which of course I’m certain was exactly what the creators of the Cathedral were going for. Although I can’t honestly say that the design of St. Stephens is that noticeably different from many of the other imposing cathedrals that I have seen around Europe, I think because it was the first one that I saw and got to spend some time around it holds a special place within my memory; something of an image of what I imagine European Cathedrals to be.

Although I don’t usually have a particularly morbid nature, I must admit that the catacombs are my favorite part of visiting St. Stephens. Again, it is probably because it was the first place that I have seen actual human bones in such a state that I remember those catacombs particularly vividly. The “old” section has been restored quite recently (within the last 100 years at least) and holds the tombs of some of the more important people that have been interned there, although of course the Kaisergruft holds many more emperors and people of great power, and it is reminiscent of what I have come to expect from typical catacombs in very old and important churches. That section is very much like the tombs in the main Cathedral in Salzburg, and in fact when I went to Salzburg earlier on the trip I did something of a double take to be sure that I had not been there before.

The “new” section, however, dates back to the times of the most recent plague to hit Vienna. Some of the rooms had an indiscernible pile of human bones that included skulls and feet, and were usually topped with a grate that used to be at the level of the street. It was clear that families (or perhaps paid movers) had simply been told to dump the bodies into the grate in the city square when somebody succumbed to the plague. It looked as though these bodies hadn’t been touched since they had been filled with the victims of the horrible disease, and had simply been walled off when they were full to allow the bodies to decompose. For me this gave a startling view into Vienna as it was during the last plague; not as a place that was disrespectful of the dead by any means, but rather somewhere that was in a time of such crises that there was simply no other options than to do what needed to be done with the incredible overflow of bodies.

In slight contrast to the rooms with bones piled in random fashion, there were also plague rooms that were filled to the brim with bones that were neatly stacked like firewood. It seemed as though they began to make a concerted effort to consolidate the space that was being taken up by all of the rotting corpses, but I couldn’t help but wonder who exactly was responsible for the grisly task. And if they were dealing primarily with plague victims, wouldn’t there have been a great chance of contracting the disease themselves? My guess is that those that had to work at these tasks were generally the bottom rung of the societal ladder, but still to be assigned that job would be inconceivable into today’s world.

The view from the top of the tower offered a breathtaking view of the city, although we had to come back three different times in order to have a day that seemed suitable to get the best idea of the kind of view that the tower offered. It was pretty incredible, and I did my best to put myself back into the time that the tower was actually completed, and to imagine what the cityscape must have looked like before construction cranes dotted the skyline. I appreciate the fact that such a historical city requires constant upkeep to retain the structural integrity of such old buildings, but it got a little bit frustrating after a little while after every single view of the city that we had was somewhat obscured by the cranes. From the top of the hill adjacent to the city on or tour, from the Belvedere, from the Gloriette above Schonbrunn Palace; every fantastic view was marred slightly by the presence of the construction cranes.

Stephensdome as a symbol of Vienna made it particularly attractive as well. Although it seems like historical buildings are now often associated with their respective cities histories and/or beginnings, Stephensdome seems to exemplify this particularly well because of the incredibly long period of time that construction took place. The city center has been dominated by the Cathedral for nearly as long as Vienna has been a viable capital of the empire, and now it seems to stand as almost a monument to the fallen promises that the Habsburg Empire failed to deliver. The entire city of Vienna seemed to be designed to be the capital of a great empire, and now that it is supported primarily by the tourism there seems to be a certain amount of bitterness within the local population. This bitterness is likely inherited from the last several generations of Viennese that actually dealt with the fall of the empire, and the ensuing disgrace of being complicit to Hitler’s Third Reich, and therefore does not have any specific target or purpose. Rather it comes across as a general contempt for those that they consider to be uneducated in the “art” of being Viennese, from knowledge of the city’s customs to the specific inflections that German speakers find unique to Vienna. I think that over the next several generations these feelings of exclusion and bitterness will die out for the most part as the older generations die with them, because with each passing generation the dissatisfaction becomes less focused and more diluted. I hope for the sake of future travelers that this is true, because although I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Vienna, it was not thanks to the Viennese themselves.