Brunnenmarkt and Yppenplatz

Market · Ottakring (16th)Vienna,Austria

Vienna's longest street market, a kilometre of stalls running between tenement blocks since 1786, its trade changing hands with each wave of arrivals.

The Brunnenmarkt is Vienna's longest street market, and the stalls run down Brunnengasse between tenement blocks instead of under a hall roof. On a weekday it is the working market: forty or fifty stands of fruit, vegetables and cheap household goods, priced for people who live on the street. Saturday is a different place, with the stall count roughly tripled and the upper end at Yppenplatz given over to a farmers' market and café tables. It has stood in the same street since 1786, when Joseph II approved a market around a public fountain. The fountain was pulled out in 1880 to clear the way for a horse tram, but the street kept the name and the market kept its line. The trade followed the district: Ottakring took in workers from the Czech lands, then from Turkey and the Balkans, and the stands changed hands with them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Let the seller pick and bag the fruit — At most stands you point at what you want rather than handling it, prices are fixed, and there is nothing to bargain over.
Walk it uphill from Thaliastrasse to Yppenplatz, not the other way — The stalls thin and the food places thicken as you climb, so the walk ends where you would want to sit down.
Buy the things the supermarkets here do not stock — The stalls carry Turkish and Balkan staples by the kilo, and the cheese and olive counters will cut a piece for you to try.
Saturday late morning is the crush and Monday is nearly empty — Trade is thinnest at the start of the week, heaviest before Saturday's close, and there is no market on Sunday.

Things to do

1
Shop one meal from three stands
Give yourself a single dish to buy for and use three different stalls: vegetables from a greengrocer near the lower end, cheese or olives from a counter mid-market, bread from the bakery at the top. You will hear at least three languages doing it, and the whole thing costs less than one café lunch.
2
Sit at Yppenplatz and watch the market end
Take a table on the square in the last hour of Saturday trading. Traders start calling down prices, crates come apart, and the street cleaners move in behind them. Within about twenty minutes the market becomes an ordinary square again, with children on the paving where the stalls stood.
3
Look up at the windows above the stalls
Stop halfway along Brunnengasse and lift your eyes off the trade. The people leaning out of the windows above the awnings are the market's own customers, not an audience watching it. Nothing here is set back or dressed up for visitors, which is why the street reads as a workplace rather than a display.