Imperial Austria

 

The Hofburg Palace

In Vienna we decided to visit the Hofburg Complex. This was originally the winter residence of the Habsburgs, rulers of Austria. The oldest parts date from the 13^th century. Today there is no need for a palace. It has been split up into various sections. So here is located the Spanish Riding School, the Hofburgkapelle famed for the Sunday masses sung by the Vienna Boys’ choir, the Imperial treasury, the Austrian National Library, as well as the Silberkammer (Imperial Silver Collection), some Imperial Apartments & the Sisi Museum. It is to the latter we went.

You enter via the silver collection. It is probably wise to go this way as I think you probably wouldn’t bother if you’d been to the Imperial Apartments & the Sisi Museum. And yet it is impressive. The sheer quantity of cooking pots, silverware, cutlery, plates, table centrepieces etc. was overwhelming. It was apparently normal for them to be cooking for 5,000 people a day at the palace, so you can imagine how much was needed to cater for so many people. There were dazzling arrays of gold & silver, & later porcelain services.

Just one room of the glittering array

We were beginning to get a bit bored by it all as we went through room after room, when we progressed upstairs to the Imperial apartments, done up as in the time of the Emperor Franz Joseph (1830-1916). The great heaters, like giant samovars, were magnificent.

There was also a great sadness about the place. The emperor’s study was bedecked with pictures of his beloved family. Yet his wife, the Empress Elisabeth (1837-1898) only showed pictures of her family in Bavaria.

More of the mystery was revealed as we moved into the Sisi Mueum. The Empress Elisabeth, affectionately known as Sisi, was a strange woman. In many ways she was the Princess Diana of her day. She was very beautiful – one look at Winterhalter’s portrait of the young Sisi proves that. She was not brought up in expectation of the role. Her older sister had been groomed for that. However, the young Franz Joseph & Sisi fell in love & that was that. She found life surrounded by so many people overwhelming, her freedom drastically curtailed as she had to behave just so. Her health was affected. She spent much of her time abroad. Eventually she was assassinated by an anarchist in France. Franz Josef was never the same again.

Later on, when we had left Vienna for our stay in the lakes & mountain of the Salzkammergut area of Austria, we visited Bad Ischl, & the Kaiservilla, the Imperial Summer Palace.

The Kaiservilla

It was easy to see why she so much preferred this place. It is so much smaller, so more manageable. She was free to go riding when she wanted, to have something like a normal family life. Oh yes, it was still a privileged but so more informal, more of a Downton Abbey than the prison of the Hofburg Palace.

We unfortunately could not go in the house due to my wheelchair. However we did explore some of the gardens & got the feel of the place, so much greener than central Vienna.

The "And yet so far away" themed garden reflecting Sisi's travels abroad to the likes of Corfu & Madeira

Part of the "White Garden" reflecting Franz Josef's love of hunting. The building behind is the Kaiservilla