Court, Cathedral and Hidden Temple: A Walk Through Vienna's Sacred Old Town

For most of its history Vienna was governed by a dynasty that understood itself as the defender of the Catholic faith, and the old town still shows it. Within a few streets stand the church where the Habsburgs married, the parish where their courtiers were buried, a Baroque church built on an emperor's vow and the cathedral that became the seat of a bishop only in 1469.

This walk reads those buildings in order, and then turns to two that complicate the picture: a synagogue that the law required to be invisible from the street, and a Gothic church that was closed, used as a stable and brought back. Six stops cover roughly seven centuries, from late Romanesque masonry to the Biedermeier years.

Duke Frederick the Handsome founded the Augustinerkirche in 1327 together with a cloister for Augustinian friars; the nave was built between 1330 and 1339 and the church was consecrated in 1349. In 1634 it became the parish church of the imperial court, and the dynasty's weddings followed: Maria Theresa and Francis of Lorraine in 1736, Marie Louise and Napoleon in 1810, a marriage by proxy, and Franz Joseph and Elisabeth in 1854.

The plain Gothic interior is itself a historical statement. Under Joseph II eighteen side altars were removed in 1784 and the church was returned to a Gothic appearance. Look for Antonio Canova's cenotaph of Archduchess Maria Christina, finished in 1805, and for the Loreto Chapel, where silver urns hold the hearts of 54 members of the imperial family. Their bodies lie elsewhere, in the Imperial Crypt.

The Michaelerkirche is one of the oldest church buildings in the city, a late Romanesque and early Gothic structure of about 1220 to 1240. You would not guess it from the square: the Neoclassical front dates from 1792, and the group above the door, Saint Michael casting down Lucifer, was carved by Lorenzo Mattielli in 1725.

Inside, the medieval nave leads to a high altar of 1782 backed by Karl Georg Merville's stucco Fall of the Angels, often described as the last major Baroque work completed in Vienna. The gilded organ, built by Johann David Sieber in 1714, is the largest Baroque organ in the city. On 10 December 1791, five days after Mozart's death, the finished portions of his Requiem were performed here at a memorial service for him.

A church of Saint Peter is recorded on this site in 1137, and tradition credits its foundation to Charlemagne around 800, a claim for which no evidence survives. The medieval building burned in 1661. After the plague of 1679 and 1680 Emperor Leopold I vowed to rebuild it, and work on the present Peterskirche began around 1701 under Gabriele Montani, with Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt taking over in 1703. It was largely complete by 1722 and consecrated to the Holy Trinity in 1733.

The site is hemmed in by houses, so the architects built upwards over an oval plan. Stand under the dome to see how much space that yields, and look up at Johann Michael Rottmayr's fresco of the Coronation of the Virgin, begun in 1713.

Saint Stephen's Cathedral began as a Romanesque church dedicated in 1147. The west wall, with the Giant's Door and the two Heathen Towers, dates from an extension of 1230 to 1245 and is the oldest part still standing. The Gothic building grew around it: the choir was consecrated in 1340, Duke Rudolf IV laid the cornerstone of the Gothic extension in 1359, and the south tower, about 136 metres high, was finished in 1433. The north tower was abandoned in 1511 and capped in 1578.

Ambition ran ahead of status. Vienna became a diocese only in 1469 and an archbishopric in 1722. In April 1945 fire destroyed the roof; the cathedral reopened fully in 1952, and its roof now carries some 230,000 glazed tiles.

From the pavement the Stadttempel looks like an apartment house, and that was the intention. Under legislation going back to Joseph II, only Roman Catholic places of worship could present a façade to a public street. When the architect Joseph Kornhäusel built the synagogue between 1824 and 1826, it was screened behind residential buildings. The interior is an oval, domed room in the Biedermeier manner, with a ring of twelve Ionic columns carrying a two-tiered women's gallery.

The concealment later saved it. In the pogrom of November 1938 the building could not be set alight without burning the houses attached to it, and it was the only synagogue in Vienna to survive the Second World War; the city's other 93 synagogues and prayer houses were destroyed. It remains the main synagogue of Vienna's Jewish community.

The name of Maria am Gestade, Mary on the shore, records a vanished landscape: the church stood on a terrace above an arm of the Danube before the river was regulated. The choir was begun around 1330, the present nave built between 1394 and 1414 and the tower between 1419 and 1428. The cramped site left its mark. The nave is narrower than the choir and bends slightly, following the line of the old riverbank.

Its most recognisable feature is the openwork stone spire, about 56 metres high. The later history is less graceful: the church was deconsecrated in 1786 and served as an arsenal and stable during the French occupation of 1809, before being restored, reconsecrated in 1812 and entrusted to the Redemptorist order.

Taken together, these buildings show how closely worship in Vienna was tied to power. The court church and the cathedral display it openly; the Peterskirche turns an emperor's private vow into a public monument. The Stadttempel shows the other side of the same order, a community permitted to pray only out of sight, and Maria am Gestade shows how quickly a church could lose its standing and how deliberately it could be given back. None of them is a relic: each still serves the purpose for which it was built.