Karmeliterviertel

Neighborhood · Leopoldstadt (2nd)Vienna,Austria

A Vienna quarter where Jewish life grew back on ground an emperor emptied in 1670, its kosher shops shut on the market's busiest day.

The Karmeliterviertel is a Jewish quarter that grew back on ground an emperor had emptied. Kosher bakeries and butchers trade on Leopoldsgasse and Hollandstraße, and they shut on Friday afternoon and stay shut all Saturday. The market square nearby runs on the opposite calendar, because its farmers' stalls are fullest on those two days. Five-storey blocks stand over shops at street level, and the quarter runs from Hollandstraße to Taborstraße, about ten minutes' walk across. In 1625 Ferdinand II ordered Vienna's Jews into a walled quarter here. Leopold I closed it in 1670 and drove out the roughly two thousand people living in its 136 houses, had a church built over their synagogue and renamed the district Leopoldstadt after himself. A year later he granted the cleared ground a weekly market, which has never stopped. The quarter takes its name from the Carmelite friars, whose church closes a small square at its eastern edge. Several prayer houses here were founded by Bukharan Jews who came out of Soviet Uzbekistan from the 1970s, and their central Asian traditions shape much of the religious life.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Check which square you are heading for — Karmeliterplatz holds the church, the Karmelitermarkt holds the stalls, their names are nearly identical, and visitors routinely arrive at the wrong one.
Do not photograph the guarded doorways — the prayer houses, schools and community offices here are working buildings for residents, and none of them take visitors off the street.
Cross one street and the food changes completely — kosher butchers and bakeries on the streets around the market, restaurants of many cuisines inside it, and old Viennese counters between them.
Almost nothing on the market square casts shade — there are few trees, residents have long campaigned for more, and on a hot afternoon the shaded tables go first.
Look up at the Carmelite church front — it has no tower, its three storeys narrow as they rise. Vienna had never built a church front on an Italian model before this one.

Things to do

1
Walk the Friday afternoon changeover
Stand on Leopoldsgasse in the middle of a Friday afternoon. Watch the kosher shopfronts pull their shutters down one after another. Then follow the pavement traffic as it reverses, with men in hats and coats walking towards prayer while the last shoppers hurry home. Within an hour the street carries a different crowd.
2
Read a name set into the pavement
Look down as you walk Leopoldsgasse and Große Sperlgasse. Memorial stones sit flush in the paving, each carrying the name of someone deported from the door beside it. Relatives ask for the stones and supply the life stories, so the names arrive one family at a time. Pick one, read it, then look up at the windows above.
3
Find the counters that came before the restaurants
Walk the two stall rows on a Saturday morning, when every farmer's place is taken. Between the bar tables, look for the counters that were here first: crates of produce, cut flowers, a horse butcher's window. Buy at one of those and you are buying from the older market, not the one that grew around it.