A tiled roof of a quarter of a million glazed tiles, a tower you climb by 343 steps, and catacombs full of Habsburg organs.
The Viennese call it the Steffl and use it as the centre of the city in the literal sense: distances are measured from here, and the U-Bahn interchange beneath is where everyone changes.
The site has held a church since the twelfth century. What stands now is mostly fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic, built over and around the earlier Romanesque work — the Giant’s Door and the two Heathen Towers on the west front are the surviving Romanesque parts, and they look it, squat and round-arched against everything above them.
The roof
Two hundred and thirty thousand glazed tiles, laid in zigzag chevrons on the south side and, on the north, in two enormous coats of arms: the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs and the arms of Vienna and Austria. The roof burned out in April 1945 — not from Allied bombing but from fires that spread from nearby shops during the fighting, and the vault collapsed. It was rebuilt by 1952, largely by public subscription, with each Austrian province paying for part.
The towers
The south tower, 136 metres, is climbed by a spiral of 343 steps to a watchman’s room. It is narrow, it is one-way, and the view over the roof tiles and the rooftops of the Innere Stadt is the best in central Vienna.
The north tower was never finished — the money and the Gothic enthusiasm both ran out in the sixteenth century, and it was capped with a Renaissance dome instead. A lift goes up it to the Pummerin, the great bell, cast originally from Ottoman cannon captured in 1683, recast after the 1945 fire, and rung to bring in the New Year.
The catacombs
Guided tours descend into the vaults, which hold some eleven thousand people from the plague years, stacked in chambers, plus the copper urns containing the internal organs of the Habsburgs. The family was divided in death between three places: bodies in the Kaisergruft under the Capuchin church, hearts in the Augustinerkirche, and viscera here. It is exactly as strange as it sounds and the tour does not oversell it.
Practicalities
The rear of the nave is free to enter and gives you a sense of the space. The main body, the towers, the catacombs and the treasury are each ticketed separately or on a combined pass. Services close sections without much warning.
Go early. By eleven the square outside is full of people in Mozart costume selling concert tickets, and the nave is full of tour groups.
More Landmarks
Schönbrunn Palace
Fourteen hundred rooms of Habsburg summer residence, a garden you can walk for free, and the oldest zoo in the world.
The Hofburg
The Habsburgs' winter residence for six centuries, now holding the Sisi Museum, the imperial silver and the crown jewels.
The Belvedere
Two Baroque palaces on a slope, with Klimt's Kiss in the upper one and the best view of Vienna's skyline from between them.