The Narrenturm
Why is it significant?
Walk around the trees until a strange round building comes into view: five storeys high, completely circular, with rows of small narrow windows like the slots of a dovecote. The Viennese nickname it the Gugelhupf, after the ring-shaped cake.
Key Facts
| Place | The Narrenturm |
|---|---|
| Address | Spitalgasse 2, Hof 13, 1090 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21860, 16.35320 |
| Part of Walk | Couches, Wax and Radium: Freud's Vienna and the Medical Quarter of Alsergrund |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk around the trees until a strange round building comes into view: five storeys high, completely circular, with rows of small narrow windows like the slots of a dovecote. The Viennese nickname it the Gugelhupf, after the ring-shaped cake.
This is the Narrenturm, the Fools' Tower, opened in 1784 by Joseph the Second beside his new General Hospital. It was one of the first buildings in Europe designed specifically for the mentally ill. Each floor is a ring of small cells, around 140 in all, opening onto a corridor around a central courtyard. The architect was very probably Isidor Canevale, the same man who designed the Josephinum you have just seen.
By the standards of its time, it was progressive: the sick were taken out of prisons and poorhouses and given a building of their own. By our standards it was grim. Patients could be chained, and the design allowed a few guards to watch many people. The tower was used for psychiatric patients until 1869, when a proper asylum replaced it.
Legends cling to it. Some say Joseph the Second, a man fascinated by Freemasonry and numbers, planned it according to a secret numerology. Others say that a lightning rod on top was meant to calm the patients with electricity. None of these stories has solid evidence behind it, but the circular shape still feels like a riddle.
Since 1971 the tower has housed the pathological-anatomical collection, and since 2012 it has belonged to the Natural History Museum of Vienna. It holds tens of thousands of specimens, preserved organs, skeletons and wax casts of diseases, gathered by Viennese doctors over two centuries. It is not for the faint-hearted, but it is a library of human suffering, and without it, medicine could not have learned what it knows. Now walk south through the courtyards of the old hospital towards the Alser Straße and the great first courtyard.