Vienna

Vienna is nothing if not resplendent with churches. First we saw yesterday was St. Stephan’s Cathedral was built on the site of two old churches, which is so often the case and has been a regular place of worship since the early 1100s! It is this insanely ornate mixture of Romanesque and Gothic architecture. I think it is the Gothic that floats my boat so much…  I am reading a pulp fiction type novel that has, like Dan Brown, made great use of real information  on churches and architecture. Just about 50 pages ago it told me that the word Gothic comes from the Greek work Goetic, which translates to magic. Such architecture was considered magical -at the time, like nothing ever seen before, with thin ribbing, flying buttresses, the impossible heights… It gave the impression of weightlessness… Well, that’s exactly what it is like wal

king through these giant edifices. They reach halfway to heaven and the waste nothing during the trip. The columns are used like alters them selves, see some of the first few pictures..  Pictures here

Lunch at a Greek  place was great, but way to much food!

Then St. Peter’s in Vienna, amazingly ornate and again built on the site of older and long gone churches going back to pre-Vienna days when this was but a Roman camp called Vindobona. They have held daily high mass here for over 1600 years! Check out the bones of a martyr they snagged from the Roman catacombs in 1733 in the glass reliquary!  This is not painted wood either like some of the other churches here, this is all carved marble and granite.

 

Then we remember the Naschmarkt that was right in the neighborhood 🙁  Still a fun stroll, but wished we remembered it before going Greek…………