Karmelitermarkt: The Heart of the Mazzesinsel
Why is it significant?
Step into the square and let the market wrap around you: rows of stalls and small permanent pavilions, crates of vegetables, cheese, bread, flowers, and on Saturdays a farmers' market that fills the whole place. Look at the people too.
Key Facts
| Place | Karmelitermarkt: The Heart of the Mazzesinsel |
|---|---|
| Address | Karmelitermarkt, 1020 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21750, 16.37700 |
| Part of Walk | The Island Across the Canal: Vienna's Leopoldstadt, Augarten and Prater |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the square and let the market wrap around you: rows of stalls and small permanent pavilions, crates of vegetables, cheese, bread, flowers, and on Saturdays a farmers' market that fills the whole place. Look at the people too. You may see a young family with a pram, an Orthodox Jewish father in a black hat, a street artist on a coffee break.
This island has a long and painful Jewish history. In 1625 Emperor Ferdinand II assigned the Jews of Vienna to live here, outside the city walls, in a walled ghetto. It grew into one of the important Jewish communities of Central Europe. Then in 1670 Emperor Leopold I expelled them all. Their main synagogue was turned into a church dedicated to Saint Leopold, and the island was renamed after the emperor: Leopoldstadt, Leopold's town.
And yet the community came back. In the nineteenth century, Jews from Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and Galicia arrived through the Nordbahnhof station nearby, and many settled right here. By the early twentieth century a large share of the district's people were Jewish, and the Viennese nicknamed it the Mazzesinsel, the island of matzah. Shops, prayer rooms, theatres and cafés filled these streets.
In 1938 that world was destroyed. Jews were driven from their homes and businesses, crowded into collection apartments here in Leopoldstadt, and deported. Look down at the pavement as you walk on. In front of many doors you will find small brass plaques, the Steine der Erinnerung, stones of remembrance, set since 2005, each with the names of people who lived in that house and were murdered.
Today Jewish life has returned to these streets in small but real ways: kosher shops, schools, a growing community. And the market has become one of the liveliest corners of Vienna. Now take Leopoldsgasse, the street running north from the market, and read the plaques as you go.