Day 11 - Habsburgs, Architecture and Miscellaneous (HAM)

Dr. Karl Vocelka

As far as this trip goes, today was a let down.  Part of it is my own fault for not remembering every detail that is said in class, so I ended up re-visiting a place I'd already been.  On the other hand I went with an expert this time so I learned a lot more.

 We started off the day with an interesting lecture about the Ottoman and Habsburg empires,  Our guest lecturer, Karl Vocelka, is from the Historical Institute at the University of Vienna.  Dr. Vocelka is and expert on the Habsburgs and has written several books about them.  He spoke at length about the history of these two families, how the Turks influenced Viennese culture and how the hardest part of historical study is trying to get past the bias of the historian and look at both sides of the issue.

"History is written by the victor."  I don't know who said it, and apparently neither does Google, but it is very true.  In America when we think of the Revolutionary war,  we think about how rotten King George was, but in England they thought the colonials were being unreasonable.  Ironically, the U.S. still has territories today that pay federal taxes and yet don't have federal representation.  That, of course, is a topic for an entirely different blog.  Even the U.S. Civil war still has people arguing about the actual catalyst.  It seems that most people believe it was about slavery, but many southerners would argue it was really about economics and yet others would insist it was about the state's right to secede.

During the Ottoman/Habsburg conflicts, the Western Europeans (esp. Catholic Austrians) thought the Turks to be "Godless Muslims who killed children and pregnant women" while completely forgetting what happened during the crusades.  If you don't know what happened during the crusades look it up.  I'm not going to discuss it because I'm snacking on my dinner right now.

It was really nice to hear someone publicly state that the most important thing when studying history is to try and find documentation on the subject and decide yourself.

Following Dr. Vocelka's talk we continued our walking lecture of the city with Chris Otto.  First we went to the Austrian National Library, only to find out it is closed on Mondays.  Then we went to Karlskirche.  You may remember I went there yesterday.  I wouldn't have gone had I remembered we were going to go as a class, but we've discussed so many churches I'm not always sure which ones we are going to see.  Dr. Otto did point out a few things about Karlkirche that certainly deserve repeating here.  

 Karlskirche was designed by Fischer von Erlach.  You may remember him as the designer of Schloß Schönbrunn.  The most interesting thing was the variety of architecture incorporated into one building.  The easiest way to see this is by looking at the pictures below and then looking again at the picture above.  

Greek temple

Asian Pagoda

Roman Dome

Egyptian Columns

French Facade

This certainly proves that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. 

I took a few more pictures of the inside of the church and was surprised to see a very large plaque that I missed yesterday that indicated that Anton Bruckner, one of my many favorite composers, premiered his Te Deum in this church.

The chapels surrounding the main alter are really interesting.  Each one has it's own lower dome that has a hole in the center.  When you look through the hole the dome is completed by the fresco on the upper level.  

After Karlskirche we returned to the Belvedere for more on it's architecture. One of my classmates noticed something strange about the coat of arms.  Dr. Otto wasn't sure what the significance was so I think I'll just chalk it up to weird.

Why would you want a dead ram hanging in your coat of arms?

When I returned to the hotel I got to Skype with Jen and Jade for about 90 minutes.  I gotta say I love this technology.  

I had just returned from the local grocery store with a few things for a light dinner and realized how differently they do things here.  First there is the money thing.  Not that it's Euros but that the smallest denomination of paper money is a five!  The coin denominations are 2 Euro, 1 Euro, .5 Euro, .2 Euro, .1 Euro, .05 Euro, .02 euro and .01 Euro.  I would love to see a coin counter piggy bank here. In addition many of the things we pay a lot for are very cheap here.  Today I bought a large wedge of Brie, six croissants, a huge bunch of green grapes, a bag of my favorite European cookies that I usually pick up at World Market and a bottle of sparkling wine for only 6.10 Euro.  At home the wine alone costs more than that.  

Another curiosity is that all of the drinking glasses here are labeled with the amount of liters the glass holds.  For example, you don't order a glass of wine, you order 1/4 liter of wine or 1/8 liter of wine. Soda, and you all know how addicted I am to my cola, actually costs more than an average bottle of wine.  

When you attend the opera in the standing room section (yes, they actually have a standing room section) you are supposed to tie a scarf to the pole you want to stand next to.  This indicates that that space is taken. Then you can go off and get a bite for dinner before the opera begins.  Can you imagine going to see an opera in the U.S. and doing the same thing?  Someone would come by and take all the scarves and sell them!  

Public transit tickets! You can buy them for each trip you take or you can buy a weekly card.  Here's the catch, no one forces you to stamp your card when you get on or off the trams.  It's all on the honor system, and the Viennese are honorable.  Only once in the last week have I seen anyone checking tickets and one of the institute presenters who has been here several times said it was the first time he'd ever been checked.

Even the graffiti here is different.  Some of it is quite beautiful.  It isn't just tagging of rival gangs who can't even spell the name of their own gang properly.  It really is graffiti art.  Sure, there is still the random senseless tagging, but most of it stays up because it is so beautiful there is no need to paint over it.

Finally, the Viennese are exceptionally polite people.  The three words I've heard more than anything else are Entschuldigen, Danke and Bitte.  Entschuldigen means excuse me, Danke means thank you and Bitte means both please and you're welcome. 

There is just so much we could learn from this country.  It is centuries older than we are and doesn't have nearly the same number of rules or regulations.  The biggest difference is that most of the people do what they are supposed to do because they are supposed to do it.  If you spill a cup of hot coffee on yourself and get burned, it's because you're clumsy not because McDonald's served you a hot coffee that you didn't know was hot. I'm sorry to be getting political here, but if we're going to survive as a nation we need to look at what much older nations are doing right and adopt some of their ideas.  It's the whole respect your elders concept. In many ways they know better because they've already made the mistakes.  Don't get me wrong, I adore the U.S.A. and I don't want to emigrate, but I would love to see us cooperate with each other as well as these people do.