Salzburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Salzburg sits on the banks of the Salzach River, at the foot of the Alps, and on the 27th of January 2006, every single one of its 35 churches rang its bells after 8:00 p.m. The occasion was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Celebrations continued throughout the entire year. That kind of reverence tells you something about this city: it holds on to its history with unusual ferocity. But Mozart is only one thread in a story that stretches from Neolithic settlement through Roman conquest, through medieval archbishop-princes, through expulsion edicts and Nazi annexation, through Allied bombing, and finally into a second life as one of Austria's most visited cities. What made a city built on salt become a world stage for music and Baroque architecture? And what does it mean that Salzburg, a city whose skyline survived the bombs relatively intact, now carries a UNESCO World Heritage designation for the very buildings that war left standing?

• 2. Built on Salt

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  The name gives everything away. "Salzburg" joins "Salz," the German word for salt, with a root from Proto-West-Germanic meaning settlement or city. The name was first recorded in the late 8th century, and it traces directly to the barges that carried salt along the River Salzach and paid tolls as they passed. Salt was not a luxury here; it was the engine of the city's early economy, alongside trade and gold mining.

  Before any of that, the area was already home to people in the Neolithic Age, making it one of the continuously inhabited sites in the region. During the La Tene period, it served as an administrative center for the Celtic Taurisci within the Kingdom of Noricum. Roman forces arrived in 15 BC and reorganized the site, eventually elevating the settlement to the status of a Roman municipium in 45 AD under the name Municipium Claudium Iuvavum. It became one of the most important cities in the Roman province of Noricum.

  When that province collapsed in 488 AD, parts of the Romano-Celtic population stayed on. The real reset came around 696 AD, when Bishop Rupert of Salzburg received the ruins of the old Roman town as a gift from Duke Theodo II of Bavaria. Rupert chose the site of Iuvavum for his basilica, built a church at St. Peter on the site of today's cathedral, and probably founded the associated monastery and the Benedictine nunnery on Nonnberg for his relative Erentrude. By 739 AD, Salzburg was the seat of a diocesan bishop. By 798 AD, it was an archbishopric. The salt trade made it rich; the church made it powerful.

• 3. Fortress and Archbishop

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  In 1077, Archbishop Gebhard built Hohensalzburg Fortress on the site of a Roman fort, making it his personal residence. That decision anchored the city's skyline for the next thousand years. The fortress was expanded repeatedly across subsequent centuries and today ranks as one of the largest medieval fortresses in Europe.

  The archbishops who followed Gebhard were not purely spiritual figures. In 996, Emperor Otto III rented Archbishop Hartwig the market rights and minting rights, and probably the toll law as well, binding ecclesiastical authority tightly to economic control. The archbishopric became a prince-bishopric of the Holy Roman Empire, answering to the emperor in theory but exercising real territorial power in practice.

  That power was tested violently during the German Peasants' War. Rioting peasants occupied the city, and the Archbishop was forced to flee to the safety of the fortress itself. It was besieged for three months in 1525. The tension eventually subsided, and Salzburg entered a long period of consolidation and expansion under a succession of Prince Archbishops: Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Markus Sittikus, and Paris Lodron. It was under these rulers, in the 17th century, that Italian architects and Austrian architects trained in the Baroque style rebuilt the city center into the form it largely holds today. Dozens of palaces and churches rose in that era, giving Salzburg the dense Baroque fabric that would centuries later earn it a place on the UNESCO World Heritage list.

• 4. Expulsion and Enlightenment

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  On the 31st of October 1731, the 214th anniversary of Martin Luther's 95 Theses, Archbishop Count Leopold Anton von Firmian signed a document that would empty the city of thousands of its own people. The Emigrationspatent, or Edict of Expulsion, ordered all Protestant citizens to recant their non-Catholic beliefs or leave. It was a stark act of Counter-Reformation authority on a date chosen for symbolic weight.

  Exactly 21,475 citizens refused to recant. Most of them accepted an offer from King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and traveled across Germany to new homes in East Prussia. Others settled in Protestant states across Europe or in British colonies in America. The city lost a substantial portion of its population in a single sweep.

  The pendulum swung in the other direction just decades later. From 1772 to 1803, under Archbishop Hieronymus Graf von Colloredo, Salzburg became a center of late Illuminism, the current of rational reform that spread across Catholic Europe in the 18th century. Colloredo's tenure intersected directly with the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who served at the archiepiscopal court from 1773 to 1781. Their relationship was famously contentious. Colloredo dismissed Mozart with the words Soll er doch gehen, ich brauche ihn nicht! which translates as: He should go; I don't need him. Mozart left for Vienna in 1781. His father Leopold, who had a close relationship with Colloredo, stayed behind. The rupture between Mozart and his employer became one of the more consequential artistic dismissals in European history.

• 5. Wars and Their Aftermath

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  The 20th century treated Salzburg harshly. The Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany, took place on the 12th of March 1938, one day before a scheduled referendum on Austrian independence. German troops moved into the city. Political opponents, Jewish citizens, and other minorities were arrested and deported to concentration camps. The synagogue was destroyed.

  During the occupation, a Romani camp was built in the Salzburg-Maxglan district. It functioned as an Arbeitserziehungslager, a so-called work education camp that supplied slave labor to local industry, and also as a transit camp holding Roma before their deportation to German camps or ghettos in occupied Eastern Europe. Salzburg also housed five subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp.

  Allied bombing campaigns destroyed 7,600 houses and killed 550 inhabitants. Fifteen air strikes accounted for 46 percent of the city's buildings, with the area around Salzburg railway station suffering the worst damage. The cathedral dome was destroyed, and the bridges were lost. Yet much of the Baroque architecture in the old town survived. That survival was not incidental. It made Salzburg, in the judgment of later historians, one of the few remaining examples of a Baroque city in anything approaching its original form. American troops entered on the 5th of May 1945. The city became the center of the American-occupied area in Austria, and several displaced persons camps were established within its boundaries, including Camp Herzl and Camp Mülln.

  After Austria signed a treaty re-establishing the country as a democratic and independent nation in 1955, the Americans left, and Salzburg resumed its trajectory as the capital of the Federal State of Salzburg.

• 6. Notable Citizens

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  Mozart is the name most visitors arrive with, but the roster of notable people born or shaped by Salzburg is considerably wider. Christian Doppler, who discovered the Doppler effect, was born in Salzburg in 1803. Joseph Mohr, born there in 1792, wrote the text to "Silent Night," which he and Franz Xaver Gruber performed for the first time on Christmas Eve 1818.

  Theodor Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian journalist and political activist credited as the father of modern political Zionism, worked in the courts of Salzburg after earning his law degree in 1884. Stefan Zweig, the writer, lived in the city for about 15 years until 1934. Herbert von Karajan, one of the most prominent orchestral conductors of the 20th century, was born in Salzburg in 1908 and died nearby in Anif in 1989.

  Georg von Trapp, born in 1880, and Maria von Trapp, born in 1905, lived in Salzburg with their children until they fled to the United States following the Nazi takeover. Their story later became the basis for The Sound of Music, which was filmed in Salzburg and Salzburg State in the 1960s. The film brought a new and enduring wave of tourism to the city. Roland Ratzenberger, a Formula One racing driver born in Salzburg in 1960, died practicing for the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. Felix Baumgartner, the record-setting skydiver and BASE jumper, was born in Salzburg in 1967.

• 7. Festival City

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  Each July and August, the Salzburg Festival draws visitors from across the world to a city whose resident population in 2020 stood at 156,852. The festival's scale means that visitors outnumber locals by a substantial margin at peak times. A Salzburg Easter Festival and a Salzburg Whitsun Festival also take place each year over shorter periods.

  The infrastructure for this scale of cultural life was built over decades. The Grosses Festspielhaus, an opera house and concert hall with capacity for large orchestral and operatic productions, opened in 1960, designed by Clemens Holzmeister. Haus fur Mozart, originally the Kleines Festspielhaus, dates from 1925. The Felsenreitschule, an open-air theatre carved into the quarry that supplied stone for Salzburg Cathedral, offers one of the more unusual performance venues in the world.

  The city's GDP per capita as of 2017 stood at 46,100 euros, exceeding the Austrian average and most of Europe. Tourism is not the only driver; Salzburg is home to three universities, including the Mozarteum University, a public music and dramatic arts institution, and the Paracelsus Medical University. Around 1950 the city passed the mark of 100,000 citizens, and in 2016 it reached 150,000. The S-Bahn line S1 connects the city to the Silent Night chapel in Oberndorf in approximately 25 minutes, a detail that draws visitors year-round but especially in December, to a chapel connected to one of Salzburg's own sons.