St Stephen's Cathedral, Vienna

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St Stephen’s Cathedral — the Stephansdom — is the principal church of Vienna, a Gothic edifice that has stood at the city’s centre for some eight hundred years and serves as the seat of the Archbishop of Vienna. A first church was consecrated on the site in the twelfth century; the building visible today is the work of the later Middle Ages, raised in stages through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Vienna grew into a Habsburg capital and wanted a cathedral to match. Its south tower, climbing more than a hundred metres, was for generations the tallest thing in the city and acquired the affectionate local name Steffl.

The roof is the building’s signature: a quarter of a million glazed tiles laid in zigzag patterns, displaying on one slope the double-headed eagle of the empire and the arms of the city and of Austria. Below ground lie the catacombs, a warren of vaults that received the bodies of plague victims when the churchyard could hold no more, and that still house copper urns containing the entrails of the Habsburg dynasty, whose hearts and bodies were interred in separate Viennese churches. The arrangement reflects an old Catholic practice of dividing the royal corpse among several sanctuaries.

As a working cathedral the Stephansdom belongs to the ordinary life of Latin Christianity rather than to any esoteric current: it is a place of Mass, coronation and burial, of bell and procession, named for the first Christian martyr. Like the great medieval churches generally, its fabric carries the symbolic vocabulary of its age — the orientation toward the rising sun, the ascent of the tower as an image of prayer, the numbered courses and proportions that masons treated as more than engineering. Such readings are a recurring feature of Gothic architecture, and how far the original builders intended them remains a matter of scholarly debate rather than settled fact. The cathedral has survived fire, Ottoman siege, and the near-total destruction of its roof in 1945, and was rebuilt each time by the city that regards it as its own.

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