Stift Klosterneuburg

 Michael's conference talk yesterday was well received, as was Nick's, and afterwards we went to dinner at a wonderfully quaint and delicious Austrian restaurant, and then wandered about the city in the evening. All and all a very nice Thursday.

The building had a sign that said 1447... I don't think it's actually that old, but maybe?

We wandered back to Stephanspatz, the main city center, and went inside St Stephan's cathedral. It was suitably wonderous.

Most of Vienna looks something like this.

Today, we re-attempted our trip to the 900 year old monastery, better armed with information about how to get there. It really wasn't that long of a trip, we just needed to get on bus 400 instead of 45. Oh well. I was definitely expecting stoic turrets and solid stone walls, and also some dark wine cellars (since the monastery is also the site of the oldest continuous winery in Austria), and what we found was not that. Turns out the Austrian Emperor Joseph II decided that the Monastery needed to be stepped up, in order to keep up with whatever the Spanish were doing in the late 1700s, so it's actually yet another Baroque palace. So it was full of ornate stucco ceilings, walnut walls, and lots of gilding. Apparently, Emperor Joseph had plans for much more to be constructed, but after his death his daughter Empress Maria-Theresea built Schonbrunn, instead, and since the monastery had to pay for all it's renovations itself, only a single main wing was finished in the full Baroque style. There is also a very fancy Gothic style church. I'm still a bit confused about what all was built when...We went on a tour of the monastery, but since it was all in german, we had to use pre-recorded audioguides which were clearly less informative than the live tourguide, which was kind of a bummer. The one bit we did have right is that there are 6km of dark wine cellars, but we certainly didn't walk through all of them! We did swing by the modern winery's tasting room at the end of the day, which seemed like a fitting cap to the visit.

Wait... that's the monastery?

pretty fancy... The plans for the building in the late 1700s included 8 of those types of domes (each representing some important crown in the austrian empire) but Emperors/empresses are fickle and construction stopped when the reign changed hands.

The clouds foreshadowed the evening weather.

But they did make for dramatic views over the river valley, and cooled the weather off quite a bit, which was quite welcome.

The monastery had an impressive treasury display... I was somewhat awed by the silver work examples.

And there was a playground?

Yeah, that's a palace dining room, not exactly monk cloisters. Although except for a brief period during the wars, the monastery has been continuously operational.

The stunning fresco in the main ballroom was all alegorical about Empress Maria Theresea, even though she was the one to abandon construction. I'm still a little confused about all the stages of remodel the grounds went through.

The hall was designed to make us mortals feel small.

The gothic church was also stunning. Also, it was pouring rain about 20 minutes before this picture.

The detail is tricky to see, but amazing in person.

The monastery is also home to the Verdun Alter, a beautifully detailed enamal artwork that depicts scenes from both the old and new testament. We couldn't get very close, but the depictions were beautiful.

After our tour, we wandered the grounds some, and found some rather short doors.

It was a pretty nice afternoon!

Once we headed back to Vienna, we wandered around looking for a spot for dinner, and ended up at a kind of funky expat british pub. It started pouring rain while we were eating, and didn't seem like it was going to stop anytime soon, so we got rather (very) wet on our way back home... but I guess we know to bring our umbrellas for tomorrow!