St. Stephen's Cathedral (Stephansdom)

Church · Innere Stadt (1st)Vienna,Austria

Vienna's Gothic cathedral at the centre of the city, its 137-metre south tower and roof of 230,000 chevron-patterned tiles rebuilt after fires in 1945.

Stephansdom stands at the exact middle of Vienna and has done for seven centuries. Its south tower reaches nearly 137 metres, and the Viennese call it Steffl, as though it were a person. 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. Inside, a stone pulpit has a figure leaning from a window beneath it, traditionally read as the carver's self-portrait. 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. Almost none of the roof is old. 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. What you stand in is medieval in design and postwar in fabric.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The measuring bars by the main door — two iron rods set into the wall left of the entrance were the city's official cloth measures, so a buyer could check a merchant's yard.
The south tower is stairs, the north tower is a lift — 343 steps up a spiral bring you close to the tiled roof; the lift opposite is easier, with a different angle.
The Habsburgs were buried in three places at once — thirty-three of them left viscera in the crypt here, bodies at the Capuchin church and hearts at the Augustinerkirche.
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. 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, and who he is has shifted: long taken for Anton Pilgram, now more often given to Niclaes Gerhaert van Leyden.