Roman Museum at Hoher Markt

Historic · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

Two Roman officers' houses with their heated floors, one floor below Vienna's oldest square, inside a fortress whose outline still shapes the streets.

The Roman Museum at Hoher Markt stands one floor below Vienna's oldest square, on the floors of two houses built for the officers of a Roman fortress. The fortress was called Vindobona, and about six thousand men lived behind a wall of roughly 400 by 500 metres whose outline survives in the street plan of the old town. Both houses belonged to tribunes, the senior officers of a legion. One had a colonnaded courtyard and heating in its floors and walls; the other made do with less, so the difference in rank is visible. They came to light in 1948, when the square was being rebuilt after wartime bombing and a sewer trench cut across them. A staircase takes you down to a walkway over the stonework, where short brick pillars still stand where they once carried a heated floor. Where later walls had to be removed, their line is painted white on the ground. Archaeologists know the Roman walls run on under the whole square, and only this one basement has been opened up.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Spend your time in the basement — the two upper floors are reconstructions and small everyday objects, and the stonework downstairs is the only thing in the building that is not a copy or a screen.
Few people come down the stairs — the square above is one of the busier crossings in the old town, but the ruins below it stay quiet enough to linger over.
Find the carved drain cover among the finds — the fortress had a working sewer system, and one of its stone grating slabs survives, cut with slots by a mason nearly two thousand years ago.
Let children handle the replicas — there is a hand mill to turn, pottery to fit back together and objects made to be touched, which makes this an easier Roman site for young visitors than a fenced excavation.
Look for a silver shopfront, not a doorway — The front is a plain metal-clad window on the square, and the ruins lie below rather than behind it, so you go down.

Things to do

1
Walk the fortress outline at street level
Leave the museum and go west into Tiefer Graben. The street drops away under you, because you are crossing the camp's western ditch. Follow Naglergasse round to the Graben, which runs along the southern ditch, then head east and come back up Rotenturmstraße, the eastern side. Twenty minutes and you have walked the wall.
2
Find the pillars that held up a warm floor
Downstairs, look for the field of short brick stacks set close together in one room. The floor they carried is gone, so you are looking straight into the cavity where hot air ran from a furnace. Rooms were heated from underneath this way, and this one belonged to the senior of the two officers.
3
Read the rebuilds in one wall
Pick a single run of stonework and follow it from end to end. These houses were repaired and rebuilt from the late first century to the early fifth, so within one wall the stones change size, the mortar changes colour, and a straight course stops and starts again lower down.