St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom)
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of the great west door, the Giant's Door, and look up at the roof: a steep slope of glazed tiles laid in a zigzag pattern of green, gold and black, with a double-headed eagle picked out on one side.
Key Facts
| Place | St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom) |
|---|---|
| Address | Stephansplatz 3, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20850, 16.37310 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Old Town Lanes: Stephansdom, Roman Stones and Medieval Legends |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of the great west door, the Giant's Door, and look up at the roof: a steep slope of glazed tiles laid in a zigzag pattern of green, gold and black, with a double-headed eagle picked out on one side. Then look down, to the right of the doorway, at the wall at about the height of your head. You are searching for two small characters scratched into the stone.
There it is, behind glass: an O and a 5. It looks like graffiti, and in a way it is. The 5 stands for E, the fifth letter of the alphabet, so the whole thing reads OE, the beginning of Oesterreich, Austria. It was the sign of O5, a resistance group against Nazi rule, scratched here in the last months of the war when even writing the country's name was an act of defiance.
Those last months nearly destroyed the cathedral. In April 1945, as the city fell, fires from burning buildings nearby spread to the roof. The timber frame collapsed, and the great bell, the Pummerin, crashed down and shattered. The original Pummerin had been cast in 1711 from cannons captured from the Ottoman army after the siege of 1683. After the war the provinces of Austria each paid for part of the rebuilding, and a new Pummerin, cast from the fragments of the old one, was installed in the north tower in 1957.
The south tower, the one Viennese call Steffl, rises about a hundred and thirty-six metres. For centuries it was the city's watchtower: during the Ottoman siege of 1683 the commander climbed it to watch the enemy camps spread across the hills.
Below your feet are the catacombs, where bones of the city's dead were stacked when the old churchyard was closed, and where copper urns hold the entrails of Habsburgs, while their hearts and bodies lie in two other churches. Mozart married in this cathedral in 1782. Now cross the square, walk down the Graben, and turn right into Bognergasse to reach the largest square of the old town.