Blutgasse and the Fähnrichshof
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly down this short, narrow lane and peer through the open doorways. Behind them hide courtyards ringed by open wooden galleries on every floor, with flower boxes and doors leading straight onto the balconies.
Key Facts
| Place | Blutgasse and the Fähnrichshof |
|---|---|
| Address | Blutgasse, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20740, 16.37400 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Old Town Lanes: Stephansdom, Roman Stones and Medieval Legends |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly down this short, narrow lane and peer through the open doorways. Behind them hide courtyards ringed by open wooden galleries on every floor, with flower boxes and doors leading straight onto the balconies. The Viennese call these galleries Pawlatschen, a word borrowed from Czech, and this lane has some of the best preserved in the city.
The name is less charming. Blutgasse means Blood Lane. The legend says that the Knights Templar had a house here, and that when the order was suppressed in the early fourteenth century, its knights were massacred in this lane and their blood ran over the cobbles. There is no real evidence for any massacre in Vienna, and historians suspect the name comes from something more ordinary. But the story has outlived every attempt to correct it.
The houses around the Fähnrichshof were in poor shape after the war, and in the 1960s they were carefully restored as a group, an early example in Vienna of saving an old quarter instead of tearing it down. Step into one of the courtyards and you hear the city fade away.
At the bottom of the lane is Singerstraße, and just around the corner stands the house of the Teutonic Order. In 1781 the young Mozart was living there in the household of his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg, and quarrelling with him. When he insisted on resigning, the archbishop's steward, Count Arco, ended the discussion by kicking him out of the room, quite literally. Mozart wrote to his father about it in a fury, and stayed in Vienna as a free musician.
So in one short lane you have a legend of knights, a courtyard saved from the bulldozer and a composer's famous boot. From here, the south tower of St. Stephen's is only a minute away, rising over the rooftops where this walk began. Go back and stand under it once more, and the circle of the old town closes.