The Volksgarten: Theseus Temple and Sisi
Why is it significant?
Follow the paths past the rose beds, past the small Doric temple standing on its mound, to the far corner of the garden, where a seated woman in white marble looks out over a pool. This is Empress Elisabeth, the woman the world calls Sisi, and the memorial is surprisingly hard to find.
Key Facts
| Place | The Volksgarten: Theseus Temple and Sisi |
|---|---|
| Address | Volksgarten, Dr.-Karl-Renner-Ring, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20940, 16.36180 |
| Part of Walk | Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the paths past the rose beds, past the small Doric temple standing on its mound, to the far corner of the garden, where a seated woman in white marble looks out over a pool. This is Empress Elisabeth, the woman the world calls Sisi, and the memorial is surprisingly hard to find. That suits her.
First, the temple you passed. It is a scaled-down copy of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, built in the early 1820s by Peter von Nobile to house a single statue: Canova's Theseus slaying a centaur. The statue has long since moved to the Kunsthistorisches Museum, so the temple is a jewel box without its jewel. The Volksgarten itself, the People's Garden, was opened in 1823, one of the first imperial gardens made for the public.
Sisi married Franz Joseph at sixteen and never really forgave the court for it. She fled Vienna whenever she could, to Hungary, to Corfu, to endless journeys. She rode, fasted, exercised for hours and kept her waist famously narrow; she wrote melancholy poetry and avoided being photographed after her thirties. After her only son Rudolf died at Mayerling in 1889, she wore black for the rest of her life.
On the 10th of September 1898, on the shore of Lake Geneva, an Italian anarchist named Luigi Lucheni stabbed her with a sharpened file. The blade was so thin that she walked on to the steamer, not realising she had been hurt, before collapsing. He had wanted to kill a royal, any royal, and she happened to be there.
This memorial was unveiled in 1907, and it is deliberately withdrawn: no horse, no crown, just a tired woman sitting in a garden with her back to the city. It may be the most honest royal monument in Vienna. Now leave the garden by its eastern gate and cross to Ballhausplatz, where the map of Europe was redrawn.