Despite not being religious in any way, I find that cathedrals are usually my favorite site to visit in any given large European city. So far Vienna is no exception.
Right off the bat I have to talk about something our tour guide, Lisa Regan, pointed out to us about the architecture of the cathedral. Notice that all the elaborate spirals, clovers, and windows come in packages of three or four. This is entirely intentional and is meant to represent either the holy trinity (The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit), or the four elements of the Earth. And so if you combine three and four you get the seven sacraments, which is also a ratio used in the architecture of the cathedral. If you note the dimensions of the building you'll see they fall neatly into these ratios. For instance, there are 343 steps to get to the top of the highest tower. This is such a cool fact and I am going to remember this for every cathedral I visit from now on out.
Rudolph IV "The Founder" fascinates me in the line of Habsburgs. He lived a brief life but left a serious impact on Austria. Out of frustration from the Golden Bull, Rudolph had the Privilegium Maius forged to legitimate his familial rule. It amazes me that he was able to make such blatant claims during this time. For example, Habsburger.net notes, "particularly presumptuous was the forgery of a letter from Emperor Henry IV dated 1058 confirming certain privileges for Austria that had been supposedly granted by Caesar and Nero". What an exciting time to live in!
It really makes me think about legitimate claims to any thrown. Because that's what they are; claims. Power was real in medieval Europe, however one came to it, but legitimized authority was invented. Rudolph the Founder serves as an excellent local example of the kinds of stories like Emperor Charlemagne in my mind.
I visited Stephansdom several times throughout the trip after the first tour, once to see the catacombs, and then on the 29th to go up both of the towers.
I don't have any photos from the catacombs tour because the tour guide forbade photography, saying, "the dead can't give permission". If I were one of the people whose bones were sitting in that crypt, I don't know if I'd care if people took photos after I had been dead for 500 years. If people say you get less insecure about your body as you get older, then these people must really be confident about the way their bones look.
However, I do have photos from when I went up both towers.
I have to note something funny that happened before I went up the 343 steps to the tallest tower. An old man looks at me as he descends the final couple steps, clearly having just been at the top, and says with a thick accent, "Much work now for nothing". Hahaha! Getting up those steps took some work, and it was hellishly hot that day so I get where he was coming from.
One of the first things I noticed once I finally got up to the top was the incredible amount of graffiti that covered the walls. Clearly there was centuries of history just in these scribbling. Generations of people from around the world looking to immortalize themselves in some small way. But the ones that really caught my eye were the ones written in Cyrillic, because invariably the date underneath would be 1945. The Russians left their mark here in a lot of ways I suppose.
Here's an example for ya. Look at the large vibrant one at the top middle of the photo.
But I think the single most fascinating aspect about Stephansdom that really sets it apart from other cathedrals in Europe has to be the magnificent ceramic tiles. I got some context to where they came from when I did a tour tour of the St. Matyas church in Buda. The St. Matyas church uses the same ceramic tiles, but with different colors, resulting in my favorite European church by far when it comes to aesthetics.
Look at that gorgeous orange pattern and the black spire!
The very friendly Hungarian tour guide was patient with my constant stream of questions, one of the first being why this church and the Stephansdom have such similar tiles. Her answer was that these are traditional Hungarian tiles that must have been exported to Vienna to make the Stephansdom when the Austro-Hungarian empire was still a thing. That goes to show how connected Vienna and Budapest were through history.
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