Last of Vienna

Just in case we would leave Vienna without feeling like we saw enough of the overly opulent, we spent the morning meandering about Schloss Schönbrunn. Described as the Habsburg’s hunting house, the grounds amount to so much more. One might describe the area and its acreage as a small township by no exaggeration.

In total, it amasses more than 400 acres. How it worked as a hunting ground is entirely lost on me. Maybe time and dime have reconfigured the landscape but sport hunting seemed incomprehensible at the place we visited. To call its structures mansionesque would be a crime. To describe its landscape as gardens would be inaccurate. To omit the fact that it is home to the oldest existing zoo would be nothing short of remiss. A triathlete couldn’t traverse the grounds without feeling winded. It boasts dozens of fountains, museums, galleries, halls, ballrooms, salons, studies, chambers, bedrooms, a network of streets, a topiary labyrinth, a library, a theater, ponds, waterbodies, rooms, and spaces called “cabinets” which house multitudes more than bowls and forks. We’re talking about a place so lavishly lousy with wealth that the royal family erected false Roman ruins just for show.

This alone is a testament to my belief that the rich are poorest in taste. The Habsburgs had so much money that they built RUINS— a spectacle meant to resemble the architecture of a fallen age. They intentionally commissioned the construction of a false structure only meant to resemble the significance of another empire. Upon seeing it, the cynic in me thought, “If they were REALLY wealthy they’d have purchased authentic Roman ruins and brought them here”. Still, against my inability to comprehend the value in making such a decision, they were a sight to behold. All of it was. While no man should claim this much for himself, the site has effectively been given back to the people. Free to roam, families and friends passed through on tours, jogs, and days out. Children played in the parks meant for them, couples walked with fingers locked, and common folk enjoyed their day in a space originally designed to keep them at bay. There is no denying that times are bleak and the world works on a system of inequity, but just maybe time has a disposition toward recompense. You see, Schloss Schonnbrun was imagined as a way of isolating those in power from those who placed them there. Shoot, it’s only an hour's walk from the Habsburg’s usual dwelling. A summer house ought to be out of town at the very least. How many palaces does one need? When the elite sought seclusion from the riff-raff of the real world, they hopped aboard a ridiculous-looking carriage here. Imagine having access to two kingdoms within walking distance. Now it belongs to all of Vienna. We chose not to tour the palace itself. Attractions like this—the kind that boast golden walls, red velvet rugs, and furniture so wrought with buttons it couldn’t possibly be comfortable to sit on—are entirely unattractive to us. Several billion in modern money isn’t quite worth the price of 25 Euro admission. Still, I’m not one who fails to recognize the forest for the trees and in this case, literally. Back in the city, Savannah and I returned to the park at The Hofburg Wien described in the previous post.

One of the few things you can’t buy in Vienna is good weather. We found us a bench and thanked our lucky stars for a half hour of sunshine. I’ll say this about European public parks: way more benches. It’s as if they actually want you to enjoy the areas your tax dollars finance. A hundred benches and half as many loosely organized chairs seldom went unoccupied. Like a cat in a sunspot, Savannah naturally dozed off for a brief moment. After which, and in a complete redirection, we moved on to a tour of the crypts beneath St. Stephan’s cathedral.

The church itself was gothic inside and out, up and down. Mary Shelly would surely have enjoyed it. Dedicated and named for the first martyr of the Catholic Church, it’s only fitting that the catacombs beneath it house over 11,000 remains from city folk who perished as a result of the bubonic plague. History tells us that St. Stephan’s utilized the areas beneath its foundation as a mass grave for those who met their untimely end and the smell of rotting flesh became so potent that several things happened:

1. They couldn’t hold mass due to the wafting stench.

2. Regardless of pay, not a soul was willing to brave the depths to deal with the issue for some time.

3. A handful of unlucky prisoners were tasked with scrubbing the decaying biomass from the bones to sanitize them.

4. They piled the bones in heaps according to type as the skeletons fell apart in the process.

Moving down an innocuous staircase present within the left wing of the cathedral, we joined a party of others who circulated through narrow chambers that kept the corpses of Vienna’s bishops and the jarred internal organs of the Habsburg line. Unable to decide where they should be buried, the Capuchin church which served as the central imperial religious entity was gifted their mummified bodies, St. Augustine’s church where they were married was gifted their hearts, and St. Stephan’s was left with the urns of their embalmed entrails. It was the kind of place you wouldn’t want to be caught dead at midnight on Halloween. Small wrought iron bars caged the ancient stone windows we peered through to see the host of skulls, femurs, tibias, ribs, and the other remains of the unfortunate lot who rested in pieces there. Photos may not have been allowed but they were taken.

The tour let out into the plaza which immediately transported you from the land of the dead to the land of the living. A sea of soccer fans chanted and cheered, romping about in anticipation of the local team’s match that night. Police lined up in formation like the riot it was, and overwhelmed with the energy we sought a quick escape. Passing by the oldest coffee shop in Austria, we prioritized our wants with our needs, returned to Oberlaa for another apple torte (and apple streusel, which I assure you are different), and sojourned home for the evening.