Side Trips: Vienna of Your Nightmares

Kapuzinergruft, Vienna

Vienna is the most beautiful, elegant, sophisticated place for contemplating what awaits beyond the veil of death and in the darkest corners of our nightmares. Amidst the baroque architecture, string quartets and bustling coffee houses serving schnitzels and tortes to tourists and locals alike, you will find more skulls, trolls, and demons per square kilometer than any other place I've ever been.

 

Anti-war and Anti-fascism monument, Vienna

In some respects, this makes perfect sense. The Habsburg Empire, in its many iterations from roughly the 11th century until the end of WWI, encompassed huge swaths of Balkan, Carpathian, and Transylvanian eastern Europe. They likely absorbed the folklore of these lands, which was rife with fantastic beasts and horrific, undead revenants, as subjects and treasure were funneled back towards the seat of imperial rule in Austria.

Still, that's not much of an explanation. Monstrous creatures are part of folklore around the world, from the wendigo in Algonquian North America, to the manananngal in the Philippines, to the tikoloshe in southern Africa and everywhere in between. Mythical beasts are also not unknown to architectural adornment, from dragons--which, depending on the time and place, can represent either diabolical (e.g., St. George's adversary) or noble aspects (as in Wales and China)--to demons that adorn some Buddhist temples, particularly in Himalayan regions.

Heracles and Cerberus, 3-headed hound of Hades. Presumably before treat-training commenced.

 

Scary monsters and super creeps support the balconies and overpasses of Vienna.

 

Mourning figure (left) and the empty "mortal coil" of life (right), Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) Vienna.

Nor is there a shortage of skulls, death imagery, and the demonic in the western, Christian architectural and funerary traditions. France pretty much covers that territory by itself. But as the adage goes, at some point, differences in quantity becomes differences in quality. And Vienna really seems to go for the gusto, volume-wise.

 

 

Vienna abounds with lightness and good cheer.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Vienna's fixation on the macabre has a lot to do with the Habsburg lineage itself. Maintaining control over vast territories of eastern and southern Europe for centuries required nearly constant warfare, against the Ottomans, Hungary and dissident factions in occupied lands (and sometimes some behind the scenes meddling by France). But perhaps more importantly, Habsburg power stemmed in large part from advantageous marriages to ensure male bloodlines as a way of rigging the pan-German election of different territories' rulers. And for extra insurance, intermarriage among royal family members became more and more common, producing not only curious physical abnormalities (such as the "Habsburg Jaw"), but also illnesses and infertility that led to the extinction in the early 18th Centrury of one line of male succession that began with Charles V (1500-1558).

Succession planning thus became a kind of royal family obsession, which of course placed death itself front-and-center of administrative affairs. It was not enough to confront the end of one's own mortal life and the assumption of eternal life in the hereafter; one also had to consider the eternal life of the dynasty.

This is most apparent in the Kapuzinergruft, the crypt below a (relatively) modest 17th Century Capuchin church where the remains of 150 Habsburg rulers and offspring reside (most of their remains, anyway, as their hearts are interred in the Augustinerkirche while their intestines reside in the crypt of Stephansdom). The tombs are awash in skulls and skeletons in various poses, adorned in crowns, armor, and other royal trappings, as well as mourning beauties and bizarre creatures.

 

 

 

Some of the haunting grave adornments in the Habsburg Imperial Crypt, Kapuzinegruft, Vienna.

A generous appraisal of these macabre grave designs would be that they instilled a sense of humility among the royal familial mourners, reminders that death is the fate of even the great and the good. Maybe. But it's equally likely that survivors were reminded that they owed their own position and power to the deaths of those who came before them, and that the same responsibility for maintaining power rested upon their own shoulders. For the Habsburgs, death was not the great equalizer, but simply another organizational obstacle.