Danube, Stephansdom, Schatzkammer

We started the day taking a bike trip along the Danube. We went to the Prater (an amusement park) to rent bikes and biked across a bridge onto Donau Insel. Since so many of the Viennese citizens bike, the city is very biking friendly. There are bike lanes everywhere and bicycle riders even have their own stoplight apart from pedestrians and cars. This is very different from America, where bikers just have a small little piece of road to ride on and making left turns is very difficult. The bridge even had a pedestrian and biking zone on the lower level. Once we got to Donau Insel, there were many walking and biking trails. Again, I saw many Turkish people barbecuing and enjoying picnics. Also on the way to the island, there were many graffiti signs of the PKK, a Kurdish Nationalist party in Turkey, which made me infer that most of the Turks here are actually Kurds who may have been oppressed by the Sunni majority. Along the biking path there were a lot of picnic tables and places where you could get down into the water. Closer to the bridge there were many bars and places to rent paddle boats and other fun water toys. The Donau Insel is actually a man made island and has proved to be a big hit with the Viennese. It is a lot like going into the countryside without getting out of the city. Today it was too cold to jump into the water, but I would definitely like to swim into the water soon.
After biking along the Danube, we headed back into Central Vienna to visit the Stephansdom. Since previously it was really crowded and I was unable to visit some of the sites. We visited the catacombs and the north tower. The catacombs were quite interesting and unique, I had never seen anything like it. The catacombs are a series of crypts and vaults beneath the gothic Stephansdom. Again, the icon of Jesus being crucified is omnipresent, on various walls through out the catacombs. The catacombs start with a vault specifically dedicated to high-ranking church officials. Here they have actually tombs and they are stacked about 9 to a wall (3x3). After the first crypt the other crypts are the final resting places of the hoi polloi. At first they would place the people and their coffins in here and stack them one by one; however, the smell became so strong and unbearable that people could smell the rotting carcasses from the Stephansplatz and also inside the church. During the plague, so many people were dying in Vienna that they did not have enough time to build coffins or give proper funeral processions for those who had died, that they just dug a hole in the Stephansplatz and would dump bodies into the catacombs of the church. Looking into the vault, you can see a lot of deteriorating bones. I had never seen so many bones in my life, it was quite a sight. The catacombs eventually began to reek and reach maximum capacity, so as punishment to prisoners, they had to clean the deceased bones and stack them to allow for optimal storage. In this crypt, the bones were neatly stacked with a skull for about every 100 bones. It seems that during the Middle Ages, prisoners had no social or civil rights. Nowadays in America, it would be considered cruel and unusual punishment to make felons clean and stack bones of the deceased.
After visiting the Stephansdom, we visited the Schatzkammer or the Imperial Treasury. The Schatzkammer is a museum located in the Hofburg and houses the jewels and valuable possessions of the Habsburg emperors and empresses. Among the gilded and precious jewel adorned items, the notable ones are: the Imperial Crown of Austria and the Holy Roman Empire, the Coronation mantle of the Holy Roman Empire, the Order of the Golden Fleece necklace, and the largest Emerald in the world. This truly shows the opulence of the Habsburgs. In my opinion, these items are completely unnecessary and all the ceremonial processions that the royalty have to go through are completely superfluous. I understand that the monarchy had to display some sort of grandiose; however, it is at the expense of their hardworking people that they were able to receive these wonderful items and they did not make much of an effort to see that all their people were living above poverty. This money could have been better used to benefit society, especially since most of the items displayed at the Schatzkammer was just for looking at or only used once. Seeing all that the Habsburgs have has really shown me that they are very wasteful and harmful to the economy for their people.