Welcome to the walk-in-vienna blog. This series has one objective and makes one promise. The objective is to tell stories about Vienna, from the past to the present, about important and unimportant but always highly interesting things and people that happen(ed to live) here. The promise: you will hear so many new and interesting things in every blog that you will want to come and visit as often as you can. Because this is my true goal: to lure you to Vienna, so I can take you on a tour. Because that's what I do - I am a tour guide.
But let's get started.
This is the first blog-post, number one, the one where everything begins so we should go way back to the beginning of Vienna. No, not to the romans. That would be too easy. Let's put a pin in the romans for now and go further back. How about the first settlement in Vienna? The oldest archeological findings in Vienna are roughly 7000 years old. Now that is more like it! That is really old, that is like stone-age-old - to be more precise linear-pottery-culture-old. If you join me for a tour of the 3rd district aka "Landstrasse", I can show you exactly where they found lots of linear-pottery-culture pottery and some pole holes for houses. And - full disclosure - you will see exactly nothing from stone-age because they built a mall on top of that. Luckily there is also a cozy market, a baroque church, a couple of beautiful city-palaces (called "Palais" in Vienna) and a villa designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein nearby, to name but a few of the attractions of this area. So a tour to Landstrasse is surely worth your while. But the real question is: is linear-pottery-culture-old old enough for this first blog, the number one, the one where everything begins?
Nope.
So let's put a pin in the pottery and go further back. Let's go back, say, 17 million years. Yes, that sounds about right. The Viennese, together with the rest of humanity, were still something of vague promise for a distant future, common ancestors of human and chimps would roam the earth for still more than 10 million years, but said earth prepared already the nest for the luckiest of the primate family, the ones who eventually would settle here in Vienna. Eventful times these were. Day-after-tomorrow-disaster-like eventful. The alps were still young and restless. You know how some people say the alps end in Vienna? These people tend to be from France and they are wrong. There are other people who say that the alps start in Vienna. These people usually are from Vienna and - somewhat unexpectedly because it is a known fact that Vienna is full of geniuses, musical and otherwise - they are also wrong. What? The truth is that exactly here in Vienna the alps actually went underground - 17 millions years ago. East of Vienna they are still there, but they are about three miles beneath the surface. What happened was that one part of the alps, restless as they were, wanted to go further north. Another part though, after some eons of continental-drifting, thought it would be a good time to settle down now and stopped. And so, the two disagreeing alpine partys said good bye, ripped the earth apart, a part of them went hurdling down in the abyss and the other part became the Carpathian mountains just east of Austria. Over the next couple of million years the trench was filled with sediments of the sea (yes even before the Habsburgs Vienna had access to the sea) and rivers, most importantly of the Danube, and is now known as the Vienna basin. The aforementioned sea is a story by itself. Its remnant nowadays is known as the black sea and, at the end of its lifespan, for centuries it swooshed into the Mediterrenean sea forming a ginormous waterfall that made Niagara look like a dribble. Anyway, only because of this alpine disagreement 17 million years ago the danube could bend so scenically around the "end of the alps", thus providing the Viennese with an ideal nesting ground between a gorgeous river and the gently sloping foothills of the alps. These latter foothills and their gentle slopes are particularly important because they are facing south and therefore, together with the mild climate and a soil just made for that, they provide ideal growing conditions for our wine. The area is dotted with taverns (Heurige) where you can have a glass of Grüner Veltliner, look down, recover from a hard day of tourism, take in the great view of the city and the Danube and thank geology for having made all that possible. Same thing if you want - like the romans and Beethoven did - to visit one of the many thermal springs to the south of Vienna.
So this is it. Or was it. The beginning. Everything else that followed, from the linear pottery guys to Franz-Josef and Sisi (she arrived in Vienna exactly where the danube winds around the alps...) clearly was a logical consequence of these primeval forces of nature. If we want to understand what is and was going on in Vienna - this is how far we have to go back!
Thanks for stopping by and see you next week!
Cheers, Max
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