Underneath St. Stephan’s Church is a catacombs bursting at the seams. It’s filled with more bones than I have ever seen before. Bones from the royal Hapsburg family, bones from the bishops, the clergy, embalmed organs from important people preserved in blackened copper pots, rooms full of coffins, rooms full of skulls, rooms piled up with bones over bones. There are “Bone rooms” where they would force laborers to clean the bones and stack them in neat piles, femurs on femurs, ribs on ribs. There are the mass graves, chambers full of bones from over 11,000 plague victims and there are also thirty other rooms with four hundred coffins in each, stacked high to the ceiling. 

I was beside myself as I passed by room after room piled hight with bones, each skull representing a person with a life full of stories and experiences.
I was told by a man at the church that there used to be a cemetery around St. Stephen’s Platz. But sometime after a law was passed prohibiting cemeteries inside of city limits. Finding a loophole, the church decided to bury the bodies underground. But the smells creeping in to the church became so dreadful that people were repelled from attending mass. I suppose this is when they forced slaves to come scrub and organize the bones. It pains me to imagine what these people had to go through. I think many of us know what it smells like when a mouse dies trapped inside a wall. Imagine over 11,000 rotting corpses.

The catacombs smell pretty much like a normal dank cellar by now. I love seeing the underground and hidden interiors of places. Now every time I pass by St Stephens church, I no longer only see whats above ground but have a mental map of the inner chambers… more puzzle pieces of Vienna. After almost three months the picture of Vienna is starting to come together.