On this blog I want to show some of the magnificent buildings. Not palaces or museums - I'll cover those in more detail later - but some other important buildings, also some Roman ruins and the Plague Column.
These two pictures are of the Austrian National Library.
The next two are of the Austrian Parliament building.
This is the famous Vienna Opera House where Mozart
and other composers conducted their original operas.
This is the Rathaus where Vienna city offices are located
and where the mayor has his official residence.
The next group is of an area of Roman-era ruins right in
the middle of the city. These ruins were accidentally
discovered when other renovations were taking place.
This area was called Pannonia by the Roman Empire, and
Vienna was a Roman outpost.
People who know me know how fascinated I am by the effect of disease pandemics on history, particularly The Black Death. I've been known to ramble on indefinitely on the subject with no encouragement whatsoever. The Black Death began in Europe in 1347 and in the next few years caused at least 25 million deaths in Europe alone. The disease returned every generation or so for the next four centuries and each time caused deaths of 5% to 25% of the population. Epidemics in the 1660s and 1670s were particularly devastating. In 1679 a bubonic plague epidemic in Vienna called the Great Plague of Vienna caused over 76,000 deaths. Vienna was the crossroads of east-west trade in Europe and as such experienced plague entering the city from both directions.
Like many cities of the time, Vienna was crowded, densely populated and had no public sewers or drainage systems. Stinking piles of garbage and warehouses stuffed with trade goods were natural homes for large numbers of rats. When the plague hit in 1679, it was particularly virulent.
To commemmorate the city's deliverance from the Great Plague, the citizens of Vienna erected monuments such as the famous Karlskirche (which we haven't visited yet) and the 69-foot-high Pestsaule, or Plague Column. The column demonstrated their gratitude to God for delivering them from the plague. Of course they thought the plague was visited upon them by God for their supposed transgressions so it puzzles me why they would erect this monument to God for ending it. I wonder if, during the period of thousands of people dying daily, anyone raised an eyebrow, cast a sardonic glance skyward and muttered sarcastically under his breath, "Thanks a lot."
The plague finally petered out in Europe in the eighteenth century after costing countless millions of lives over 400 years. And no one even knows what the final toll was in the rest of the world.
One amusing note: have you ever heard the folk song, "O du lieber Augustin?" I remember singing that song in German class in high school. Apparently, Augustin was a drunken street musician and during the epidemic of 1679 fell into a open stinking mass grave of plague victims. He didn't get the plague and is remembered in the folk song. That absolutely cracked me up! They wrote a song for him because he didn't get sick!
On a side note: when Kate and I took the tour of the catacombs of St. Stephen's Cathedral, we saw the remnants of a mass grave of 600 plague victims from The Black Death found when they were doing a renovation on the church. It was surreal to me to look through the bars into a dungeon-like chamber where the jumbled skulls and bones of the victims still lie.
Here is the Pestsaule, or Plague Column. They're doing
construction on the pavement around the column.
This is the inscription on the Column. I don't know much
Latin, but it commemmorates the city's deliverance from the
plague. Leopold II was the monarch at the time, the date
was 1679, and "Pestis" refers to pestilence, what they
called the plague.
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