St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom)

Church · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna, Austria

Stephansdom stands at the exact middle of Vienna and has done for seven centuries. Its south tower reaches nearly 137 metres and was among the tallest structures in Europe for a very long time; the Viennese call it Steffl, as though it were a person. The Romanesque west front with its Giant's Door survives from the 1200s, and everything behind it is High Gothic — a thicket of pinnacles outside, and inside a stone pulpit with a figure leaning from a window beneath it, traditionally read as the carver's self-portrait. The roof is what people photograph: about 230,000 glazed tiles laid in hard chevrons, with a double-headed eagle picked out on the south side. It is almost entirely new. In April 1945 fire spread into the cathedral from burning shops nearby, brought down the roof and the choir vaulting, destroyed the organ and the choir stalls, and shattered the great bell. The rebuilding was divided among the Austrian provinces, each paying for a part — a floor, a window, a set of pews — and the cathedral fully reopened in 1952. What you are standing in is medieval in design and postwar in fabric.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The measuring bars by the main door — two iron rods are set into the wall to the left of the main entrance, the city's official cloth measures, so a buyer could check a merchant's yard against them on the spot.
The south tower is stairs, the north tower is a lift — 343 steps up a tight spiral for the close view of the tiled roof, or a lift on the other side for less effort and a different angle.
The Habsburgs were buried in three places at once — the crypt under the chancel holds copper urns of viscera, while the bodies went to the Capuchin church and the hearts to the Augustinerkirche; thirty-three of them lie in all three.
Come back after the square empties — floodlights catch the spire once the shops close, and the cathedral reads as a shape rather than a crowd barrier.

Things to do

1
Climb the 343 steps
The south tower stair is a tight stone spiral with no room to pass, and it takes about ten minutes of steady climbing. The reward at the top is the tiled roof at close range, sloping away in chevrons, and the whole old city fitting inside the ring of boulevards below.
2
Walk the outside once, slowly
Go all the way round at ground level before going in. The building changes century by century as you pass — Romanesque doorway, Gothic buttresses, a Renaissance cap, a nineteenth-century restoration — and the roof only reveals its pattern from certain angles across the square.
3
Go round to the back of the pulpit stair
Lizards and toads climb the handrail, evil working its way up towards the preacher, and beneath the steps a man leans out of a carved stone window holding a chisel, with a mason's mark on the shield above him. The Viennese call him the Fenstergucker, the window-gawper. Who he is has shifted: long taken for Anton Pilgram, now more often given to Niclaes Gerhaert van Leyden.