The Graben and the Plague Column
Why is it significant?
In the middle of Vienna's smartest shopping street rises something that looks like a frozen explosion: a column of marble clouds, tumbling angels and gilded rays, climbing towards the Holy Trinity at the top. Walk around it slowly, because the most interesting figure is not up in the clouds.
Key Facts
| Place | The Graben and the Plague Column |
|---|---|
| Address | Graben, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20870, 16.36980 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire |
| Generated | Generated |
In the middle of Vienna's smartest shopping street rises something that looks like a frozen explosion: a column of marble clouds, tumbling angels and gilded rays, climbing towards the Holy Trinity at the top. Walk around it slowly, because the most interesting figure is not up in the clouds. It is halfway down, on its knees.
That kneeling man in armour and a long curly wig is Emperor Leopold I, the ruler who ordered this monument. Look at his face and you will notice the jutting chin and the heavy lower lip, the famous Habsburg jaw, which centuries of marriages between cousins passed from generation to generation. The sculptors did not flatter him. They did not need to. An emperor on his knees in a public street was flattery enough for heaven.
In 1679 the plague came to Vienna. Estimates of the dead vary wildly, but tens of thousands died in a city that was still squeezed inside its medieval walls, and the court, like most people who could afford it, left town. Leopold vowed that if the epidemic ended he would raise a column to the Trinity. A wooden version went up almost at once. The marble one you see took until 1693, and a whole team of artists, among them the theatre designer Lodovico Burnacini, who is why the whole thing feels a little like an opera set.
Look at the lower part of the column. A furious old woman is being hurled down into the abyss by an angel. She is the plague itself, shrivelled and ugly, falling headfirst out of the city's sight. Viennese children have been staring at her for three centuries.
The name of the street is a clue to how old this ground is. Graben means ditch: this was the moat outside the walls of the Roman camp of Vindobona, filled in during the Middle Ages and turned into a market, then a promenade. So the emperor kneels on top of a Roman ditch. Now take Spiegelgasse or Seilergasse south to Neuer Markt, where a plain church hides the strangest royal tomb in Europe.