Dear Alexandre,

I know you are quite new to Vienna and you didn’t had that much time to explore it yet, but I will try to help you with my humble knowledge of a city that I went to school in, but never actually lived inside its borders. Since you come from the US, I am safe to say that Vienna has a long history – maybe not as long as the ancient cities of Mesopotamia, but it seems to have been a place for human culture for about 4000 years now. A lot can happen in 4000 years! Romans, Mozart, emperors, operas, Schubert, Stephansdom, cemeteries, magicians, more composers, black death, wine, basilisks, ocarinas, playing cards, stolen skulls, whole orchestras, wars, crimes, psychiatrists, and lots and lots of cakes, coffee and Wiener Schnitzel with Erdäpfelsalat – so much history, so much pain, so much culture, so much tragedy, so many people and so many stories – just a usual European capital.

I noticed your special interest in classical music and magic and I will keep that in mind, when you follow me along on this written walks around the city. I hold those topics dear myself, but feeding a stereotype Viennese people have about themselves, I am also interested in death and decay and cemeteries and death culture in general. Vienna has certainly a morbid side with its folk tales, where the appearance of death as a character is quite common. When I grew up, my mother had a friend – a typical Viennese with a German first name and a Hungarian last name – who would talk again and again about how things will be after he will have died. With him, we also visited the cemetery of every village we would spend a bit time in. I always loved cemeteries as a kid and still do. They are calm and green with a lot of flowers and you can read names, which I always enjoyed for a reason, I don’t fully grasp. So, I hope you conclude from that, that I don’t believe in ghosts or other supernatural misbehavior of the dead. Growing up in the household of a paleontologist also means, that I never in my life had the feeling that bones are scary. They were everywhere around his desk, to be sorted and looked at. For me cemeteries are a place of peace, of sadness as well, but calm and full of blossoms.

But it is not a cemetery I want to visit with you today – not a usual one at least. Not that long ago, I found myself on a guided tour through the Stephansdom. After a short tour around the nave, we went downstairs to the catacombs. It is not much to visit down there: a room full of coffins with the remnants of past cardinals of the Stephansdom inside, a little room, where you can see in what bad shape the catacombs were, before they sorted them out again (after the war I guess) and a lovely display of artfully stacked skulls and bones that someone did in a time, when this was fashion. And then there is a room that really surprised me. It had a few sarcophagi inside, but what actually thrilled me, was the pots – big metal pots – where they keep the organs of dead emperors. Yes, I was standing in front of a big pot, that looked like it was made for cooking Gulasch for a really big family, and was reassured by the guide, that inside it the intestines of Maria Theresia are swimming in an alcohol solution. Really, as I got out of bed that day, I never had thought that I would stand just a few hours later beside such an obscure object. Of course, I had to research the funeral procedures of the Habsburg family.

What I found out was really interesting, scientifically and culture-wise. The Habsburg’s would bury their dead on three different places. In Vienna those places are not far apart from each other. The Kapuzinergruft is just a short walk away from the Stephansdom. There you can find the bodies of the monarchs. To visit their hearts you have to go around the corner. They are placed in little urns in a chapel in the Augustinerkirche between the Albertina and the National Library. In Viennese this place is called Herzerlgruft because of that. So, you see: three different places – one for the body, one for the heart and one for the rest of the intestines. A bit weird, isn’t it? I wondered about where this tradition was coming from and I found some answers.

During the middle ages, members of monarch dynasties and their wealthy companions traveled a lot, often for dangerous stuff like war business, for the crusades for example. The death of a ruler abroad brought a scientific challenge with it. How can the dead body be preserved for the long journey home? No refrigerators, no formaldehyde, no knowledge of mummification… No wonder, people needed to be creative. Even if you just want to display your dead ruler for just a few days, you will be in need of embalming! So, just in case you find yourself in a weird embalming emergency one day, here are some tips:

Hurry up to stop the process of gut bacteria feeding on the inside of the body by putting out the organs. You can preserve them by laying them in alcohol for example. In Gulasch-pot for example.

Try to wash out the inside of the body with something that has disinfectant values like that alcohol, you just used for your royal intestine jar.

Fill up the body with something dry like ash or sand.

Close the body and then use something to disinfect and dry out the skin. There are so much possibilities! Acetic acid, different types of resin – you remember good old Alexander the Great? His body got conserved with honey (for a short period of time). I can not guarantee for that measures to actually work that well, so you better hurry up with getting the body home for the funeral! Also, to rub the body in something that smells nice might be a good idea.

If you have a linen cloth, you can put it in wax and turpentine and call it a sparadrap – which will make you sound very professional. You can wrap the body inside it and hope for the best!

With that in mind, it is clearer, how a trend of storing the organs of a dead monarch separately could have come into fashion. Even if you need the body to look fresh for just a few days of viewing, the removal of the organs will help slow down the decaying process. The heart was valued as the most noble of organs, so a tradition was started to place the heart on an extra spot, bury it or to put it in an artful urn, like the ones you can see in the Herzerlgruft. And when you already have three separate parts of the body, it also makes more sense to bury them in three different places. Famous King Richard Lionheart, for example, was buried in three different places as part of a scheme to show that he was the mighty ruler of a vast kingdom – with a hint of “and therefore his successors have the right to rule here as well” between the lines, I would guess.

But maybe this is the right place to mention mos teutonicus, which translates to “German practice”. Let’s head back to the crusades! As the Austrian Herzog Friedrich II. from the Babenberger dynasty (that were the Austrian rulers before the Habsburger took over) drowned on the way back from Palestine, it was still a very long way to go. So it was decided to follow the mos teutonicus and his body was cooked. Yes, this is a bit surprising, isn’t it? Whilst I can imaging the process of opening a dead body and getting the organs out and all the other stuff, that was necessary in the olden days to embalm a body, I struggle to imagine that particular process. It seems to be a curing process, although the descriptions I found, were not really precise. Again the organs were removed, but also the body would be dismembered and then boiled for hours in water or wine or milk or whatnot. Then the flesh would be removed from the bones. The bones were the easiest to transport, even for long distances, and freed from anything that would rot, they were also the most hygienic part of the dead body to be around. To get them out and cleaned seemed to be the most important part of the procedure. The flesh and the organs could be buried immediately, although they were often also transported to a place considered dignified enough for a burial. The clear bones, that were also sprinkled with wine and Spezereien - which are mostly spices that smell good - could be on display already on the way back home and finally buried in home ground, which seemed to be a common wish of crusaders. It sounds a bit like a recipe for Glühwein, but I guess in the end it was a more hygienic practice than just travel through hot weather with a rotting corpse. Glühwein…. They could as well have called it the Austrian practice 😜. So, if you find yourself at a Glühweinstand this winter, don’t forget to spare a thought for Babenberger king bones. They might have smelled the same.

Visit the catacombs of Stephansdom (you will need a guided tour for that) for looking at pots with juicy intestines. Go to the Kapuzinergruft on Neuer Markt, if you want to see some ornated coffins of rich people. You can also pop in the Augustinerkirche to have a look at the urns, that contain the remnants of emperor hearts. Those spots are all very close to each other.

By the way, the described practice of separating the organs from the body of dead emperors ended with Kaiser Franz Josef. When he died in 1916, new and easier techniques for embalming were already developed, quite similar to what is used today. This is the reason, why you can visit his whole body in the Kapuzinergruft – well hidden in an elaborate designed casket, I can imagine. I have to visit the place myself one day.

 Your friend and (maybe a morbid) guide 😉