Vienna's Imperial Heart: The Hofburg, the Habsburg Crypt and Six Centuries of Empire

From a plague column vowed by a frightened emperor to the crypt where Habsburgs must knock to be let in: palace courtyards, royal hearts in silver urns, white horses and the balcony of 1938

Vienna · 12 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. The Graben and the Plague Column

Graben, 1010 Wien, Austria

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.
2. The Imperial Crypt (Kapuzinergruft)

Tegetthoffstraße 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

You are standing in front of what is perhaps the plainest church facade in central Vienna: a flat front, a painting above a simple door. Beneath your feet lie around a hundred and fifty Habsburgs, among them twelve emperors and eighteen empresses. The most powerful family in Europe chose to rest with the poorest order of friars.

The crypt was founded by Empress Anna, wife of Emperor Matthias, and its first burials came in the 1630s. It was a deliberate act of humility: the Capuchins took a vow of poverty, and a Habsburg buried among them was saying that before God an emperor is a beggar too. The friars still guard the vault today.

And then there is the ritual at the door. When a Habsburg funeral arrives, a herald knocks and a friar inside asks who seeks entry. The herald recites the dead man's titles, emperor, king, duke, and the answer comes back: we do not know him. He knocks again, with a shorter list, and again is refused. Only the third time, when he announces simply a mortal, sinful human being, does the door open. The ceremony was performed as recently as 2011, for Otto von Habsburg, the eldest son of the last emperor.

Inside, humility gives way rather quickly. The double sarcophagus of Maria Theresa and her husband Franz Stephan is a Baroque bed of bronze, with the couple sitting up, gazing at each other as if they had just woken. Maria Theresa used to come down here to sit beside his coffin after he died in 1765. And one woman lies among the Habsburgs without being one: Countess Fuchs, the empress's beloved governess, given a place of honour by a grateful pupil.

Strangely, many of these bodies are incomplete. For centuries the hearts were taken to one church and the entrails to another, so a single Habsburg could be buried in three places at once. You will meet the hearts very soon. Now walk west along Tegetthoffstraße to Albertinaplatz and climb up onto the old city bastion.
3. The Albertina and the Bastion Terrace

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Wien, Austria

Climb onto the high terrace in front of the palace and turn around: the Opera is in front of you, the roofs of the Ring beyond it, and under your feet is not a pavement but a fortification. This terrace is one of the last pieces of the bastions that once wrapped the whole inner city.

The palace behind you belonged to Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, and his story is a rare one in this family: a love match. Maria Theresa married off almost all her daughters for politics, Marie Antoinette to France among them. But her favourite, Maria Christina, was allowed to marry the man she wanted, Albert, a younger son with little money. The empress gave them a fortune to make up for it.

Albert spent much of it on paper. From 1776 he built up a collection of drawings and prints that today counts tens of thousands of drawings and around a million prints. Its most famous treasure is a small watercolour by Albrecht Dürer of a young hare, painted in 1502, every hair of its fur done one by one. It is so sensitive to light that the original is only shown now and then; most of the time a copy sits in its place.

Look down at the square below the terrace. On this spot stood a large apartment building, the Philipphof, and in March 1945 a bomb brought it down onto its air-raid cellar. Hundreds of people were sheltering inside, and many were never recovered. The stark monument against war and fascism by Alfred Hrdlicka, unveiled in 1988, stands here for that reason, and the bronze figure of a Jewish man forced to scrub the street remembers what Viennese crowds did to their neighbours in 1938.

So the terrace holds both faces of the city: a duke's tender collection, and the memory of its worst years, a few metres apart. Now walk along the terrace and down the ramp into the garden behind the Hofburg, where the emperors once grew their palms.
4. The Burggarten: Palm House and Mozart

Burggarten, Burgring, 1010 Wien, Austria

Find the flowerbed in front of the white marble statue, the one planted in the shape of a treble clef, and you have found the Mozart monument. Behind you curves the glass and iron wall of the Palm House, and beyond the trees the traffic of the Ring rushes past, oddly muffled.

This garden exists because of Napoleon. When his army occupied Vienna in 1809, the French blew up part of the city bastions as they left, and the wreckage was cleared away. Instead of rebuilding the wall, Emperor Franz I took the space for himself and laid out a private garden. He was a passionate gardener, which his courtiers found faintly embarrassing in a monarch, and he liked to work with his own hands among the plants.

The Palm House is the garden's crown, a long Art Nouveau glasshouse built in the early twentieth century by the architect Friedrich Ohmann. In its time it was a winter refuge for the court's exotic plants; today one wing is full of tropical butterflies, flying free in the damp heat while snow falls on the Ring outside.

Mozart, meanwhile, is a newcomer. The statue by Viktor Tilgner was unveiled in 1896 on Albertinaplatz, where you just stood, and was damaged in the war. In 1953 it was restored and moved here, into the peace of the garden. Look at the reliefs around the base: scenes from Don Giovanni, and the child Mozart playing with his father and sister, the little prodigy who once, so the family story goes, jumped into the lap of Empress Maria Theresa and kissed her.

For a century only the imperial family and their guests could walk on these paths. The garden opened to everyone in 1919, after the monarchy fell, and the Viennese have been sprawling on the lawns ever since, something the old court would never have allowed. Now walk north through the garden gate towards the vast curved facade of the Neue Burg and out onto Heldenplatz.
5. Heldenplatz and the Neue Burg

Heldenplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria

Walk out into the middle of this enormous square and let it make you feel small, which is exactly what it was built to do. Behind you the Neue Burg spreads its curved colonnade, and on the lawns two bronze generals rear up on their horses, facing each other across the grass.

The rider on the left as you face the Neue Burg is Archduke Charles, who defeated Napoleon at Aspern in 1809. Look at his horse: it balances on its two hind legs alone, with no tail or extra support touching the plinth. The sculptor Anton Dominik Fernkorn pulled off that feat in 1860. The other horseman is Prince Eugene of Savoy, the general who helped turn back the Ottomans after 1683.

The Neue Burg itself is a half-finished dream. It was meant to be one of two matching wings embracing the square, part of a gigantic Imperial Forum reaching across the Ring to the museums. Building began in 1881 and dragged on until 1913. Then the war came, the empire collapsed, and the twin wing was never built. So the square is shaped like a sentence nobody finished.

On the 15th of March 1938, three days after German troops crossed the border, Adolf Hitler stood on the balcony of the Neue Burg and announced the entry of his homeland into the German Reich. The square below was packed with a cheering crowd. Within days, Jewish Viennese were being humiliated in the streets, and in the years that followed the deportations began. For decades afterwards Austria described itself mainly as Hitler's first victim; only from the late 1980s did the country openly face how many of its people had cheered.

The square has answered that balcony since. In January 1993 it filled again, this time with a sea of candles held by a huge crowd protesting against hatred of foreigners. The same stones, a different city. Now cross the square towards the trees of the Volksgarten, and look for its little Greek temple.
6. The Volksgarten: Theseus Temple and Sisi

Volksgarten, Dr.-Karl-Renner-Ring, 1010 Wien, Austria

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.
7. Ballhausplatz and the Congress of Vienna

Ballhausplatz 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

Stand on the square and face the long, calm Baroque building with the Austrian flag above the door. It looks like the residence of a minor prince. In fact it is the Federal Chancellery, and for two centuries the word Ballhausplatz has meant, quite simply, Austria's foreign policy.

The name is pure court life. A ballhaus was a hall for an early form of tennis played with the palm of the hand, and the court's ball-game hall stood here. The chancellery replaced it in the years after 1717, designed by Lukas von Hildebrandt, the architect of the Belvedere, to house the secret court chancellery, the office that ran the empire's diplomacy.

In the autumn of 1814, after Napoleon's first defeat, the crowned heads and ministers of Europe gathered in Vienna to put the continent back together. The host was Prince Metternich, and the serious bargaining happened in these rooms. Everything else happened in ballrooms. There were so many balls, hunts and concerts that an old prince, Charles de Ligne, quipped that the Congress dances but does not move forward. Then, in March 1815, the dancers learned that Napoleon had escaped from Elba, and suddenly they moved forward very fast.

The settlement signed in June 1815 held the borders of Europe roughly in place for decades, and with it the Habsburgs regained much of their prestige. For a few months, Vienna was the capital of the whole continent.

The building has a darker memory as well. On the 25th of July 1934, Austrian Nazis stormed the chancellery in a failed coup and shot the chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss, who bled to death inside. He himself had shut down parliament and ruled as a dictator, which makes his story uncomfortable to tell on either side. Now walk through the passage in the Amalienburg wing, into the courtyard called In der Burg, and on to the red and black Swiss Gate.
8. The Swiss Court and the Imperial Treasury

Schweizerhof, Hofburg, 1010 Wien, Austria

Pass through the gate painted in red, black and gold, which once had a drawbridge over a moat, and step into the small courtyard beyond. You are now in the oldest part of the Hofburg, the core of a castle that grew for six hundred years until it swallowed a whole district.

On your way here you crossed the big courtyard In der Burg. The wings around it hold the Imperial Apartments, where Franz Joseph worked and Sisi lived, and you will reach their entrance at the end of this walk. This gate is the Swiss Gate, built in 1552 under Ferdinand I, whose titles are spelled out above the arch. It takes its name from the Swiss Guards who once stood here. The square courtyard behind it follows the plan of a thirteenth-century fortress with four corner towers.

Under the arcades is the entrance to the Imperial Treasury, and inside lies the Imperial Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, an eight-sided crown of gold plates, pearls and uncut gems made around a thousand years ago. For centuries German kings were crowned with it. Next to it lies the Holy Lance, once believed to be the spear that pierced Christ's side.

And then the oddities. A long spiral horn, over two metres tall, was treasured as the horn of a unicorn. It is a narwhal tusk, but it was valued above gold. A huge agate bowl was long thought to be the Holy Grail, and the family declared it a possession that must never leave the house.

Look also for the steps to the Burgkapelle, the court chapel, where on Sunday mornings the Vienna Boys' Choir still sings Mass, as court singers have for over five hundred years. Now leave the courtyard by the passage on the far side, cross Josefsplatz and follow Augustinerstraße to the door of the court church.
9. Augustinerkirche: Weddings and Hearts

Augustinerstraße 3, 1010 Wien, Austria

Step into the tall, white Gothic nave and let your eyes adjust. It is a cool, almost severe church, without much gold, and yet for two centuries this was where the Habsburgs said yes. From 1634 the Augustinian church served as the parish church of the imperial court.

The guest list is extraordinary. Maria Theresa married Franz Stephan of Lorraine here in 1736, a genuine love match by royal standards. In 1770 her daughter Marie Antoinette was married here by proxy to the future Louis XVI, with her brother standing in for the absent groom. In 1810 Napoleon married Marie Louise, daughter of the emperor he had defeated, in the same way. And on the 24th of April 1854 the young Franz Joseph married sixteen-year-old Elisabeth here, under a blaze of candles.

Now look along the aisle for a white marble pyramid with a dark doorway. A procession of mourners is slowly walking into it, a woman carrying an urn, a child, an old man, while a lion sleeps on the steps. It is the tomb that Antonio Canova made for Archduchess Maria Christina, the duke's beloved wife from the Albertina, finished in 1805. She is not even buried inside it. It is pure grief in stone.

Behind a small chapel is the strangest room of all, the Heart Crypt. Here, on shelves, stand fifty-four silver and copper urns, each holding the heart of a Habsburg. Remember the crypt you visited earlier: the bodies went to the Capuchins, the entrails to Saint Stephen's Cathedral, and the hearts came here, to the church of the court. Three funerals for every emperor.

The custom lasted until the nineteenth century, and the last heart arrived in 1878. It sounds macabre, but it was meant tenderly: the heart stayed close to the palace, near the family. Now step out and walk back up to Josefsplatz, where an emperor rides in front of the most beautiful library in Europe.
10. Josefsplatz and the State Hall of the National Library

Josefsplatz 1, 1010 Wien, Austria

This is the most perfectly proportioned square in Vienna, three sides of pale palace fronts and in the middle an emperor on horseback dressed as a Roman. He is Joseph II, Maria Theresa's restless son, and the statue went up in 1807, long after the reforms he had pushed through too fast for his subjects.

Joseph is a fascinating figure for a royalty walk because he disliked royalty. He opened the imperial parks to the public, abolished serfdom, closed hundreds of monasteries and tried to replace coffins with reusable ones to save wood. That last idea caused such outrage that he had to withdraw it within months. Vienna loved its funerals too much.

The tall central building behind the statue holds the State Hall of the National Library, the Prunksaal, commissioned by Emperor Charles VI and built in the 1720s by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and finished by his son. Inside, walls of walnut bookcases rise to a painted dome by Daniel Gran, and around two hundred thousand old volumes stand in rows, many of them from the private library of Prince Eugene of Savoy. In the centre, Charles VI himself stands in marble, as if the books were his court.

Now turn round and look at the palace opposite, with the giant figures holding up its doorway. That is the Palais Pallavicini, and film fans will know it. In The Third Man, shot in the ruined Vienna of 1948, it played the home of the racketeer Harry Lime, and this square became one of the shadowy stages of the most famous film ever made about the city.

Charles VI, by the way, had no son. He spent his reign persuading Europe to accept his daughter as heir, and the library rose while he worried. The daughter was Maria Theresa, and she did rather well. Now take Reitschulgasse, the narrow lane at the northern corner, and listen for hooves.
11. The Stallburg and the Spanish Riding School

Reitschulgasse 2, 1010 Wien, Austria

Walk slowly along the lane and look through the arches of the old Renaissance building beside you. With luck you will see a white head looking back at you over a stable door. This is the Stallburg, and the Lipizzaner stallions of the Spanish Riding School live here, in the middle of the city, as they have for generations.

The Stallburg was built in the 1560s as a residence for the future Emperor Maximilian II, and only later became the imperial stables. Across the lane rises the Winter Riding School, a white Baroque hall built between 1729 and 1735 by Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, where the horses perform their slow, impossible dance under chandeliers.

Why Spanish? Because the breed goes back to Spanish horses, the most prized in Renaissance Europe. In 1580 Archduke Charles founded a stud at Lipica, near the Adriatic, which gave the Lipizzaners their name. Today they are bred at Piber in Styria. And here is the surprise: they are born dark, brown or almost black, and turn white only gradually, over six to ten years.

The riding hall has seen more than horses. In 1848, the year of revolution, Austria's first elected parliament met inside it, with deputies sitting where the stallions now trot. And at the end of the Second World War, the breeding herd was in real danger. American troops under General George Patton helped bring the mares and foals to safety, a rescue that still makes old riders in Vienna emotional.

The movements the horses perform, the leaps and the high, almost floating steps, grew out of the training of war horses, though no cavalry officer ever rode quite like this. The school calls itself the oldest riding academy in the world still practising classical horsemanship. Now walk on to the end of the lane, where it opens into a round square under a great green dome.
12. Michaelerplatz and the Imperial Apartments

Michaelerplatz, 1010 Wien, Austria

Stand by the railing in the middle of the square and look down into the pit: stone walls, old foundations, the remains of a Roman settlement, lying a few metres below the horse-drawn carriages waiting for tourists. Then raise your eyes to the great green dome of the Michaelertor, the gate of the Hofburg, and you have the whole history of this city in one glance.

The ruins belong to the civilian town that grew up outside the Roman camp of Vindobona, nearly two thousand years ago. They were excavated in the early 1990s and left open, a reminder that the emperors built on somebody else's capital. The domed wing above you is surprisingly young: it was planned in the Baroque age but completed only in the 1890s, when Franz Joseph finally gave the palace a proper front door onto the city.

Turn around and look at the plain building opposite, with its green marble columns and smooth upper floors without window frames. That is the Looshaus, finished in 1911. To the court it looked naked, a house without eyebrows, and the story goes that the old emperor disliked it so much he avoided looking out of the windows facing it. Whether or not that is true, the whole city argued about it for years.

Under the dome is the entrance to the Imperial Apartments and the Sisi Museum. Inside you can see Franz Joseph's study, where he signed documents from before dawn, and his simple iron camp bed: the emperor of fifty million people slept like a soldier. In Elisabeth's rooms stand her gymnastic bars and rings, fixed in a doorway, the private gym of a woman who wanted to escape her own palace.

Franz Joseph reigned for sixty-eight years, from 1848 until his death in 1916, in the middle of the war that ended his empire two years later. This walk began with an emperor on his knees in the Graben, and it ends with another one in a narrow soldier's bed. From here, Kohlmarkt leads straight back to the Graben, and the whole imperial city lies behind you.