Am Hof: The Square Where an Empire Ended
Why is it significant?
Walk into the middle of this wide, slightly lopsided square and turn to face the white church front with the broad terrace across its upper floor. It looks like the balcony of a palace, not a church. That is because it was built for announcements. The name Am Hof means at the court.
Key Facts
| Place | Am Hof: The Square Where an Empire Ended |
|---|---|
| Address | Am Hof, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21110, 16.36770 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Old Town Lanes: Stephansdom, Roman Stones and Medieval Legends |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the middle of this wide, slightly lopsided square and turn to face the white church front with the broad terrace across its upper floor. It looks like the balcony of a palace, not a church. That is because it was built for announcements.
The name Am Hof means at the court. In the twelfth century, when Duke Heinrich II of the Babenberg family moved his residence to Vienna, he built his castle here, and for about a century this square was the centre of power. The Habsburgs later moved to the Hofburg, but the name stayed.
From the balcony of the church, Kirche am Hof, on the 6th of August 1806, a herald proclaimed that Emperor Francis II had laid down the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. An empire that had existed in some form for about a thousand years, since the time of the Ottonian kings, ended with a speech read to a square. Napoleon had made it impossible to continue, and Francis, who had already declared himself Emperor of Austria two years earlier, simply closed the old firm. A generation before that, in 1782, Pope Pius VI had blessed the crowd from the same balcony, on a visit meant to stop Joseph II's church reforms. It did not work.
The column of the Virgin in the middle of the square was vowed in the Thirty Years' War, when Swedish troops threatened Vienna in 1645. And the square has a grim memory from the revolution of 1848: in October of that year, a furious crowd dragged the war minister, Count Latour, out of the ministry that stood here and lynched him. Within weeks, imperial troops retook the city by force.
Look at the grand building with the trophies on its roof. It was the citizens' armoury, and today it is the headquarters of the Vienna fire brigade, which still keeps a museum inside. Now walk to the north-west corner of the square, where a short street opens onto a long, sloping triangle called the Freyung.