Melk & Vienna

 One of the top rated places to visit in Austria is the Benedictine Abbey in Melk. It is a gorgeous abbey founded nearly one thousand years ago. At its zenith it was home to seventy monks, a place of visit for Austrian royalty, and a center for diplomatic affairs in northern Austria. Now it is home to thirty monks, an ecclesiastical treasury, and a middle and high school for children of the surrounding countryside. It still supplies fifteen priests to it’s subsidiary parishes in the rejoin. Melk is a charming town, still very small and as we walked up cobblestone streets we enjoyed the beautiful view of the picturesque homes over which stood the gloriously dominating figure of the abbey.

 

We arrived at the perfect time to join a guided tour. The tour took us through the “secular side” of the monastery, where the Austrian royal family used to live when visiting. It is now a gallery filled with the treasures of the monastery, beautiful vestments, reliquaries and relics of the Cross of Christ and of St. John the Baptist among others. We also saw the beautiful library of the abbey which is still active today.  The tour was about an hour long and ended just in time for us to join the monks in prayer at noon which they do publicly in their gorgeous chapel, which is really more like a basilica inside of the monastery compound. After prayer and a walk around the church we went back to the train station for the one hour ride to Vienna.

Once we got to Vienna we checked into our hostel, it was the hostel with the finest location but was not very clean, my first time in a real collegiate backpacker dirty but cheap hostel. I had not done much planning for Vienna so I spent about an hour or so looking over some of the things we wanted to see in the city. For dinner we took the metro across the city to Leopoldauer Alm, a restaurant serving up huge portions of local food.

Chris and I dug into one of the group meals they offered. The challenge, if we could finish the meal, we got a free bottle of wine! We did not finish the meal, we did not get any free wine. But on the way home we were able to give our hefty leftovers to some homeless men we came across while on the way home.

The next day great perseverance paid off! The Fraternity of St. Peter was offering Mass in the Kapuzinerkirche, translated Capuchin Church at 8am. Finally I found where the internet said Mass was held, and it was actually offered at the time advertised! It was a lovely twenty-minute walk to the church I made both days in Vienna. After Mass I returned to the hostel and Chris and I headed out for the day.

We walked around the “museum quarter” as well as the  gardens once reserved for Austrian nobility before going to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, one of the top museums in Austria, full of classical art as well as a beautiful collection of royal treasures. We spent probably two hours in the museum it was truly wonderful.

Afterwards we grabbed a braut in front of the Rathaus followed by visiting the “Vigil Church”, essentially a cathedral for the northern part of the city. It was in the process of being cleaned and renovated but the steeples which had recently been finished were beautifully white. My favorite feature unique to churches in this eastern part of Europe, at least as far as I have seen is, is the stylized roofing made with different colored shingles in geometrical patterns, this church as well at St. Stephen’s, the Cathedral in Vienna, are wonderful examples of this uniquely beautiful roofing style.

After touring the church we headed into the city center via the subway planning to see St. Stephen’s. Once we arrived we found that the tickets we were hoping to buy were no longer available that day so we planned to come back to following morning to get a holistic experience of the cathedral. We wandered around a bit before heading home for the evening.

The next day I got up and went to Mass with the FSSP once again then we headed to the city center and breakfast at a café just around the corner from the cathedral.  Afterwards we bought our tickets and climbed up the cathedral steeple. From the top we took in the stunning view of the cathedral roof and city center just below, to the Vigil church and royal palace out in the distance along with the whole of Vienna.

Next we went to the Cathedral treasury housed in the choir loft of the cathedral. We saw chalices and art, but the most unique thing about the Cathedral treasury, once we had reached the end, we proceeded up a spiral staircase into a room, this room had large wooden and glass cabinets filled with relics of unimaginable number. Countless relics large and small, from the most famous saints, even the twelve apostles, to the most obscure and unknown.

There was even an altar containing skulls of eight different saints. After this overwhelming display we left the cathedral for a while. Chris wanted to purchase a lederhosen for his coming trip to Oktoberfest, so I waited while he tried them on in a tiny little shop filled with traditional Austrian dirndls, lederhosen, hats and more. Once he had the perfect pair we went back to the Cathedral for a tour of the catacombs.  Below the church are buried both cardinals and royalty along with many canons of the cathedral. In addition there are nearly 40,000 bodies buried under the church, from when there was still a graveyard, and from the outbreak of the black plague, since their were too many people dying to be buried they just put the bodies in piles in the catacombs. You can still see many of the bones today and  they have all been disinfected so no risk of catching the plague while on tour.

After the tour we got on the subway and headed back to our place to pick up our bags and we were on our way to Prague.