Our objective for closing out our first evening in Vienna was a visit to St. Peter's Church, known to the locals as the Peterskirche. The Peterskirche wasn't far from the Demel bakery and chocolate shop, where we'd just finished an afternoon snack. To get there, we headed back along Kohlmarkt, the pedestrianized street where Demel was, and turned right onto another pedestrianized street called Graben.

The origins of the Graben go all the way back to when Vienna was a Roman outpost called Vindobona. Vindobona was protected by walls, and outside the southwestern wall, as an additional defensive feature, there was a trench (the meaning of the German word graben). The trench remained in place into the early Middle Ages, but in the 12th Century, the ruling dukes of the Babenberg Dynasty came into some money via the ransoming of Richard the Lionheart (see the Vienna Introduction page for more on this) and expanded the city, building new walls beyond the existing ones. The old trench was filled in and levelled, and became a new street. For many years the Graben was a natural marketplace surrounded by residential structures, but in time it became a fashionable promenade, surrounded by upscale residences and shopping establishments. In the 20th Century the Graben became busy with auto traffic, but in 1974 this was discontinued, when the Graben became Vienna's first pedestrian zone.

Probably the most distinctive structure in the Graben is the 69-foot baroque Plague Column, or Pestsäule (pest-zoyleh). The Pestsäule was built to commemorate the city's survival of a 1679 plague which killed nearly a third of the population. The Habsburg emperor Leopold I ordered the building of the column (he didn't actually participate in the plague, hastily leaving town for the duration), which wasn't completed until 1693. The column is pretty complicated, but is essentially divided between a lower earthly section with inscriptions and coats of arms and a small number of figures (including a praying Leopold), and an upper heavenly section with many angelic figures perched in an especially cloudy version of heaven, with a gilded Holy Trinity at the top. Several artists were involved, but the project ended up being managed by a man named Paul Strudel.

But the Graben on this evening was for us a means to an end, the end being the Peterskirche. In the 1609 depiction of the Graben seen above, besides the absence of the Pestsäule (which hadn't been built yet), you might notice a church on the right, somewhat to the north of the Graben. This Peterskirche is thought to have been built in the 12th Century or earlier, but it was destined to burn down in 1661. Besides having the Pestsäule constructed as a result of the 1679 plague, Leopold I also vowed to have the Peterskirche rebuilt. He lived to see the construction begin in 1701, but it wasn't completed until 1733, during the reign of his son, Charles VI.

The Peterskirche is reached from the Graben via a very short street called Jungferngasse, a little to the west of the Pestsäule. The church itself is shoehorned into a fairly small area known as Petersplatz, which it fills completely. Because of the surrounding buildings, it's impossible to see all of the church from ground level at once, but it's tall and generally oval in shape, with a large green dome. We headed inside to see what there was to see.

At only 160 feet long and 66 feet wide, the Peterskirche is not a large church, but its chief architect, Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, and several painters, sculptors and designers contrived to fill it with as much baroque as humanly possible. Starting with the main altar, which is highlighted by a painting featuring Saints Peter and Paul, by the baroque Italian painter Martino Altomonte.


The inside of the 177-foot-high dome is covered with a fresco by J.M. Rottmayr which depicts the Coronation of the Virgin.

The gilded pulpit, sculpted by Matthias Steinl, is particularly ornate, with a canopy depicting the Holy Trinity.

The extreme ornamentation continues to other features common to Catholic churches.

Across from the pulpit is a dramatic sculpture, by Lorenzo Mattielli, of the Martyrdom of St. John Nepomuk, topped by a sculpted Our Lady of Bunzlau.


Along the side of the church, as with many Catholic churches, are altars devoted to saints. But since the church is so small, there aren't very many of them, in fact only six. Here are some of them:




Satisfied with enough baroque for one evening, we headed back out into the damp evening and found a department store where we could do some browsing. Normally Nella is more interested in this sort of thing than I am, and this was no exception, but once in a while, some of the differences in merchandise between foreign stores and comparable stores at home can be interesting.

Eventually we headed back to the hotel for our evening rest. We weren't quite sure what we would be doing the next day, as the weather was making us play things by ear. But unknown to us, the first main destination for our day was fated to be the Albertina Museum.