St. Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

• 1. Introduction

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  St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna rose from a site that was already ancient before the first stone was laid. Excavations carried out in 2000 for a new heating system uncovered graves lying two and a half metres below the surface, carbon-dated to the fourth century. A Christian building had stood on this ground, it now appears, even before the church considered the oldest in Vienna. That discovery reframes everything you are about to hear: this is not simply a medieval cathedral. It is a palimpsest, layer upon layer of devotion, ambition, disaster, and rebuilding, pressed into a single square in the heart of one of Europe's great cities. How did a modest Romanesque parish church consecrated in 1147 grow into the towering Gothic landmark whose south tower reaches 136 metres into the Viennese sky? Who ordered the transformations, who survived the fires, and what does it mean that the largest bell in Austria was cast partly from the wreckage of a bell that crashed through the belfry floor during a wartime blaze?

• 2. A Church Built on a Treaty

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  In 1137, two powerful men met in the town of Mautern and signed an agreement that would change the face of Vienna. Bishop Reginmar of Passau and Margrave Leopold IV divided influence over the city, and the margrave received stretches of land beyond the city walls. The one parcel excluded from that grant was the plot set aside for a new parish church. That exception was the birth certificate of St. Stephen's. The church was solemnly dedicated in 1147 in the presence of Conrad III of Germany and Bishop Otto of Freising, among other German nobles preparing to depart on the Second Crusade. The decision to dedicate the building to St. Stephen was not incidental: Stephen was also the patron of the bishop's cathedral in Passau, and the new church was oriented toward the sunrise on Stephen's feast day of the 26th of December, as that sunrise fell in the year construction began. For well over a century the building remained a parish church under Passau's authority. The long campaign to change that status began in 1365 when Duke Rudolf IV, ignoring the church's actual rank, unilaterally installed a chapter of canons more appropriate to a cathedral. It took another century, but in 1469 Emperor Frederick III persuaded Pope Paul II to grant Vienna its own bishop, appointed by the emperor himself. The Diocese of Vienna was canonically established on the 18th of January 1469, with St. Stephen's as its mother church. Then in 1722, under Emperor Charles VI, Pope Innocent XIII raised the see to an archbishopric, a status it retains today.

• 3. Fire, Stone, and Rudolf IV

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  On the 23rd of April 1263, a replacement Romanesque church was consecrated on the site of a building largely destroyed by a great fire in 1258. Every year since, the anniversary of that consecration is marked by a rare three-minute ringing of the great Pummerin bell. The man who transformed that second Romanesque church into the Gothic structure visitors see today was Duke Rudolf IV, known as the Founder, who laid the cornerstone for a westward Gothic extension on the 7th of April 1359. His motivation was partly spiritual and partly political: Vienna lacked a great cathedral of its own, and Rudolf wanted the clout that came with one. The expansion was vast. It eventually swallowed the entirety of the old Romanesque building; by 1430, the old edifice was removed from within as work on the new cathedral proceeded around and above it. The south tower, the building's most recognisable feature, was completed in 1433 after 65 years of construction. Vaulting of the nave then continued from 1446 to 1474. A matching north tower was begun in 1450 under master builder Lorenz Spenning, but major work on the cathedral stopped in 1511 and the tower was never finished. In 1578, the truncated stump received a Renaissance cap, which the Viennese promptly nicknamed the water tower top. It stands today at 68 metres, roughly half the height of its southern counterpart.

• 4. What the Roof Holds

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  The roof of St. Stephen's is 111 metres long and carries roughly 230,000 glazed tiles arranged in elaborate patterns. Above the choir on the south side, the tiles form a mosaic of the double-headed eagle of the Habsburg dynasty. On the north side, the coats of arms of the City of Vienna and the Republic of Austria are laid out in colour. In 1945, fires caused by nearby wartime damage jumped to the cathedral, destroyed the wooden framework of the roof, and caused it to collapse. Replicating the original timber bracing for a structure that rises 38 metres above the floor would have been prohibitively expensive, so the restorers used more than 600 metric tons of steel instead. The roof is steep enough that rain keeps it clean on its own, and snow rarely settles on it. Recent restoration projects have been gradually returning portions of the exterior walls to their original white limestone after centuries of accumulated soot turned them black. The stone is porous, and sealing it with silicone would trap moisture inside and cause cracking when that moisture freezes. The permanent Dombauhütte, the cathedral's own construction department, is investigating a process that would impregnate the cavities within the limestone to prevent water infiltration without sealing the surface.

• 5. The Bells

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  St. Stephen's Cathedral currently houses 22 bells distributed across four separate belfries. The most famous is the Pummerin, mounted 20 metres above street level in the north tower. It weighs 20,130 kilograms and measures 3.14 metres across at its mouth, making it the largest bell in Austria and the third largest swinging bell in Europe. It was cast in 1951 at St. Florian in Upper Austria and delivered to the cathedral as a gift from the provincial government. The bell it replaced, known as the Old Pummerin or Josephinische Glocke, had been created in 1705 under the direction of founder Johann Achamer and was composed partly from metal taken from nearly 300 cannons captured during a failed Ottoman assault on the city in the late 1600s. Because the architect Friedrich von Schmidt judged the tower too fragile to survive the forces of a swinging bell, the old bell sat in an oak cradle and was sounded by eight men pulling its clapper back and forth with ropes. When the fire of 1945 overtook the belfry, the burning cradle gave way and the bell crashed to the floor. The shattered pieces were mixed into the metal used to cast today's Pummerin, which was put into service in 1957. In the south tower, eleven of the thirteen bells are used for traditional pealing; they were cast in 1960 by the Pfundner Bell Foundry. On the 16th of March 2022, those bells sounded erroneously for 20 minutes beginning at 2:11 in the morning. The cathedral's priest, Toni Faber, confirmed that hackers had remotely accessed the computer-automated system that controls the bells. The Pummerin was not affected. Among the oldest bells in the building is the Chorglöckl in the northern Romanesque tower, dated to approximately 1280, which traces its history to the great Vienna fire of 1276. Its clapper, last repaired during the Baroque period, was found hidden in a niche in the tower wall when restorers recovered the bell from disuse and returned it to service in 2017.

• 6. Saved, Then Burned

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  During the final days of World War II, St. Stephen's Cathedral narrowly escaped deliberate demolition. Wehrmacht Captain Gerhard Klinkicht refused a direct order from the city commandant, known as Sepp Dietrich, to fire a hundred shells and reduce it to rubble. What artillery did not do, civilian chaos nearly accomplished. On the 12th of April 1945, as Soviet Army troops entered the city, looters set fires in nearby shops. Wind carried those flames to the cathedral, severely damaging the roof and causing it to collapse. Protective brick shells built around the pulpit, the tomb of Frederick III, and other major artworks reduced the damage to the most valuable pieces. The carved Rollinger choir stalls, dating to 1487, could not be saved. Reconstruction began almost immediately. The cathedral had a limited reopening on the 12th of December 1948, and a full reopening followed on the 23rd of April 1952, the same date commemorating the 1263 consecration. Within the south tower, the clock bells survived, including the Uhrschelle, dating to around 1449, which still strikes the hour.

• 7. Mozart, Habsburgs, and a Weeping Icon

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  A memorial tablet on the exterior of the cathedral records that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had been appointed an adjunct music director here shortly before his death. He was married at St. Stephen's in 1782, two of his children were baptised there, and his funeral took place in the Chapel of the Cross on the 6th of December 1791. Prince Eugene of Savoy, commander of imperial forces during the War of the Spanish Succession, is also buried in that same chapel, in a vault containing three coffins and a heart urn under a stone slab with iron rings. The Ducal Crypt under the chancel holds 78 bronze containers with the bodies, hearts, or viscera of 72 members of the Habsburg dynasty, starting with Duke Rudolf IV, who ordered the crypt built before his death in 1365. Among the funerals the cathedral has hosted are those of Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1916, Empress Zita of Bourbon-Parma in 1989, and Otto von Habsburg in 2011. A very different kind of arrival took place in 1697, when a small Byzantine icon known as the Maria Pötsch was brought to the cathedral after reports that the painted Virgin Mary had shed real tears twice in 1696 in the Hungarian town of Mária Pócs. The 50 by 70 centimetre icon had been commissioned in 1676 from the painter Istvan Papp by a man named Laszlo Csigri, who could not pay the six-forint fee; a buyer named Lorinc Hurta stepped in and donated it to the local church. Emperor Leopold I ordered it moved to Vienna for safekeeping from Ottoman armies. Empress Eleonora Magdalena commissioned an ornate framework for it upon its arrival after a five-month triumphal journey. The icon has not been reported weeping since, but the copy sent back to Pócs has reportedly wept and worked miracles, and the village renamed itself Mariapocs in recognition. The cathedral's association with musical history runs still deeper: among the Kapellmeister who served there were Johann Joseph Fux from 1701 to 1712 and Johann Georg Reutter from 1738 to 1772, during whose tenure Joseph Haydn and his brothers served as choirboys.

• 8. Stone, Measures, and Memory

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  Embedded in the cathedral wall to the left of the main entrance are two iron bars representing the official Viennese ell length standards used to regulate the sale of cloth in the Middle Ages. One bar corresponds to the linen ell of 89.6 centimetres, also called the Viennese yard; the other represents the drapery ell of 77.6 centimetres. Canon Testarello della Massa first mentioned these embedded standards in 1685 in his book describing the cathedral, noting that the ratio between the two measurements is exact. The Giant's Door, or Riesentor, which serves as the main entrance, may owe its name to a mammoth thighbone unearthed in 1443 while digging the foundations for the north tower; it hung above the door for decades afterward. Inside the cathedral, the stone pulpit, long attributed to Anton Pilgram but now thought more likely to be the work of Niclaes Gerhaert van Leyden, features relief portraits of the four original Doctors of the Church on its Gothic petals and a handrail decorated with toads and lizards biting each other. Beneath the stairway of that pulpit is a carved figure peering out of a small window, known as the Fenstergucker. The chisel in the figure's hand and a stonemason's mark on the shield above suggest it may be a self-portrait of the sculptor. In November 2019, art historians discovered a mural under layers of dirt on the wall of what is now the cathedral's gift shop, believed to be the work of the Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer. Some of the cathedral's architectural drawings date from the Middle Ages and are on paper fifteen feet long and too fragile to handle; laser measurements of the building have produced a digital three-dimensional model, and a computerised system now produces life-sized models to guide the nine full-time stonemasons on staff.