St Michael's Church and Crypt (Michaelerkirche)

Church · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

A church facing Vienna's imperial palace with four thousand of the court's staff buried beneath it, about twenty of them dried into mummies.

St Michael's Church has about 4,000 people buried under its floor, and about twenty of them dried into mummies instead of decaying. No emperor lies among them. This was one of the imperial court's own parish churches, facing the Hofburg across a small square, so the dead below are the court's staff: chamberlains, clerks, shopkeepers and their families. Hundreds of coffins stand in the brick chambers, some of them open, with wigs still on the dried bodies. Italian priests called Barnabites took the church over in 1626 and spent the next century cutting more chambers; the last coffins went down in the 1780s. The church above is open all day and you can walk straight in, and inside it is dark, with a wall of white figures spilling down the far end above the altar. Getting below is another matter: you go down only with a guide, by narrow stone stairs into a cold draught, and people do find it hard. Upstairs, a mass is said every evening.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look at the coffin lids before you look at the faces — Painted skulls, hourglasses and worn flowers cover the older wooden boxes, and on a few the paint has survived almost whole.
Turn round at the door as you leave — The organ over the entrance was built in 1714 and restored to that state in the 1980s. It is the largest baroque organ in Vienna.
Treat the crypt as a grave — Nothing down there stands behind glass, photography and filming are not allowed, and the guide will ask you to keep your distance.
Look for Pietro Metastasio twice — The imperial court's opera poet died in 1782 and lies in the crypt. His memorial tablet is upstairs, in a chapel on the north side.

Things to do

1
Find the same angels carved twice, sixty years apart
Stand under the porch before you go in and look up at the gable. Michael is driving the rebel angels down over the doorway, carved in the 1720s. Inside, walk to the front and find the scene again in white, made in the 1780s and built like a stage set so the light falls on it from above.
2
Look past the baroque to the church underneath
The 1780s fittings are only a wrapper. Stand in front of the altar and look up at the wide arch above it, where painters in the 1300s put Christ and the apostles judging the dead. Restorers uncovered it again. Behind the altar are tall pointed windows, left from the rebuilding of this end in the 1300s and 1400s.