Art & Culture various essays on, well, art and culture Bookbinding & Conservation lessons learned from this profession Humor ok, I'm not the guy from SNL, but I still have a sense of humor 'Jim Downey' Stories mostly true stories from my adolescence Personal Essays more "it's all about me" Politics I’m at -7.13/-7.33 on The Political Compass.  Where are you? Society observations on the human condition Travel Europe 1994       Kronach       Coburg       Vienna       Mödling       Vättis       Ramsgate       Chester Wales 1998 Wales 2003 Wales 2006 CCGA Vignettes

Mödling Getting out of Vienna was mercifully easy.  American-style superhighway, but at Autobahn speeds, for 20 minutes, and we were at the Hinterbrühl exit.  Onto a four lane road for a few minutes and we were in the small town of Mödling, where Alix had been a summer student just a few years before I had been in Kronach.  The area has grown up a lot since she was there, the small town still intact as an entity, but the surrounding area having essentially become a suburb of Vienna.  First thing we did was get stamps and see about information on the town, maybe find a tourist information center where we could book a room, figuring the post office to be the best bet.  Little luck at the post office, so we decided to stop in at one of the B&B's listed in our guidebooks . . . they were full up, made a few calls around, and discovered that most other small hotels and B&B's were likewise full.  Almost apologetically, they recommended "The Beethoven", which our guidebook described as a modern four-star hotel - in other words, expensive.  Not outlandish, but more than I would pay for any hotel room in the States.           What the hell.  This was our vacation, after all.  It was a very nice hotel, just across the street from a small park where the composer from whence they got their name used to relax.  Seems he considered Hinterbrühl to be the perfect place to recharge his batteries after the stresses of composing for some Emperor or another.  I was never clear on the details of this, or whether he was actually supposed to have stayed at "The Beethoven", though I suppose it must have been called something else at the time.  And it probably had been updated a bit too.  In fact, the guidebook was right . . . it was very modern.  The building seemed to be only a few years old, with the latest in contemporary artwork, framed sheets of music manuscripts (what else?), 'Euro-style' leather chairs and lamps, and a bar that could have come straight out of an "Embassy Suites" atrium.  Nice room, though compact.  We dropped off the bags, jumped back in the car, and went exploring.           Driving around Mödling and Hinterbrühl, Alix trying to get her bearings.  I wanted a cup of espresso and some pastry (this was Austria, after all), and we wound up in a little place just across the street from the hostel that she stayed in when she was a student there.  Turns out the little place, which used to be a full-fledged snack bar, now is mostly a small store, and the closest thing they had to pastry were these odd cookie-like dry wafer bars (picture a Kit-Kat without the chocolate coating) that were made somewhere on the other side of the continent.  Oh well, at least they had coffee and apfelsaft.  The building where she stayed was this neat apartment-style complex, built into and around this outcropping of stone at the base of a small mountain.  In fact, we were in a very narrow little valley with mountains all around, so much so that the light seemed dim and the day late, though it was still quite early in the afternoon.  Alix told me that they used to walk up the mountain there behind the building to the castle ruins at the top.  It sounded good to me, so finishing our drinks we got back in the car.  There was a road going up behind the building, and we figured that it had to get us at least closer to the top.           Wrong.  Or, actually, correct, but you couldn't go up that way.  Oh, we drove up there, along the narrow street which led to a sort of lodge where the local political types met for their weekly meetings, or some such.  No public parking.  Plenty of signs that made a vague threatening sort of sense.  I wasn't feeling that adventurous.  We backed down the road until there was room to turn the car around.  The small map of the area we got at the post office showed a parking place next to the nature trail that went up the mountain, but to get there we had to jog over one ridge, and go up a different way.  Again, a steep climb with no where to turn around, but fortunately we met no oncoming traffic.  Sure enough, we came at last to a parking area, which seemed to be both a public parking area for the hiking trail and the parking lot for a couple of alpine lodges/restaurants, one of which was hosting a wedding reception, the other seemed mostly empty.           Into the woods, and up the trail.  Typical nature trail, gravel where there might be mud, otherwise generally bark mulch or dirt paths.  Timbers set into the ground as steps for areas where the way was a little steep and erosion needed to be controlled.  As we wound around the mountain, rising on the path, we came back to where we could overlook the alpine lodges and parking area.  There, starting at the lodges and going up the mountain, was a broad expanse of rich green meadow, European red deer playing at the far end.  The pines were unlike any I had ever seen before, their branches coming out in usual fashion except at the top, where they spread out horizontally, twisting and turning back and forth, like multijointed alien fingers splayed to hold a tray of fantastic size.  The effect was one of layering, each successive rank of trees on the hillside creating a terrace of their tops, as though they had grown up flat against the underside of some ceiling.  Weird.  I had never seen trees grow like that, nor did I again on our trip, outside of that area.           Back and forth, up and up.  By the time we reached the summit, the sun was angling just over the tops of the other mountains to the west, and I was tired and sweaty from the climb.  Alix, breathing just as hard as I was, said that she didn't remember the mountain being so high, but that she and the others in her group didn't come up to the ruins more than once or twice.  And the ruins were great!  It was the "Castle Mödling", a small keep just large enough for a family and a few retainers, dating back to the 12th century.  Not a lot left of it.  The main building had most of the walls of the ground floor, with parts of the upper floors left, built at the very apex of the mountain, right on the living rock.  Parts of a couple of outer buildings, and the lines of the walls still visible in the way they shaped the space of the mountaintop.  The view from there was wonderful.  Off to the north you could clearly see the sprawl of Vienna.  Down the other side of the mountain from where we started was the town of Mödling itself, still largely undisturbed from it's medieval days.  Across the main valley was the ruins of another castle . . . the "Black Tower" (though it was actually the natural dull white of limestone), built as a ruins by some crazed American during the last century, who thought that he could make his fortune off of it (on a continent where real ruins are about as common as dirt . . . go figure).  Slightly off in a different direction, on another mountain overlooking the same valley, were the outlines of a classical temple . . . actually, a war memorial, the first in Austria, though I have yet to find out to what war.           We took photos and played on the ruins a bit, then started the trek down.  Tired and thirsty, we stopped at the lodge that looked mostly vacant for a drink.  Inside a hedge off the trail, past some huge chestnut tree that was so large and ancient that the limbs reaching out from the trunk were big around as a man, supported by poles propped up under them, buckeyes littering the ground thickly.  We went up on one of the terraces, sitting at a small wooden table, high enough that we could look over the hedge off into the meadow we had seen from above.  The deer were still playing at the far end, though you needed binoculars to see them clearly.  The owner was sitting off to the side of the chestnut tree, talking with a friend, a bottle of wine between them, playing with her dogs, who occasionally wandered over to say hello and sniff us up a bit.  I don't know if they weren't officially open, or just that things were very casual in the off season, but no one bothered to come over and wait on us.  Eventually, Alix went inside, in quest of someone to take our order and to find a restroom, and succeeded in both her quests.  The beer was good (I had a German import I knew I could trust) and the view satisfying.  Midafternoon turned into late afternoon, and eventually we left to go into Mödling itself, to look around there before it grew dark.           Pulling into a tree-shrouded parking lot just outside of the town proper, we left the Opel at the foot of one of the supporting arches of an aqueduct, crossed a small footbridge over a creek onto the walking path into town.  It was cool and shady there, the late afternoon sun behind the mountains.  Most of the center of the village has been turned into a pedestrian walkway since Alix was there, and the changes to the streets and shops had her confused for a bit.  Yup, the place sort of seemed like it had gone yuppie, maybe part of a 'revitalization' effort to save the town while appealing to the more monied young Viennese who hadn't killed themselves yet on the roadways.  Definitely upscale themes in a number of the stores, and little boutique shops featuring crafts and giftie items.  Felt like one of the pseudo-historical districts in some American downtown, except of course here all the buildings really were 500 years old, all the streets had honest cobblestones worn smooth by use instead of polishing machines, and the shops probably had been originally owned by craftsmen, not just duded-up to look like it.           Actually, it was charming.  And if it took YUAs (Young Urban Austrians) shopping there to save the town, the trade-off was probably worth it.  We weren't there during the worst of the tourist or Christmas season, so I will withhold final judgement.  But walking around at the beginning of autumn, with most of the shops closing at 5 as we wondered by, it was delightful.  Just as it started to get dark we made the yard of the Catholic church on the edge of the town, slightly higher than the rest.  It was here that many people fleeing the oncoming Turks took refuge, as the Turks moved on Vienna.  But it did them little good, as the church was set fire with incendiary shells from the Turkish artillery, and hundreds perished, trapped inside.           We stepped inside the church, quiet, unlit, dark.  There was enough light left outside that the stained glass windows, neither as large nor elaborate as those we had seen in the great cathedrals but somehow more real, glowed with a softness, a richness, a suppleness that one does not normally associate with light.  It felt like the light was moving slowly, draping itself in colors, dancing in this odd fabric of glass, before settling over us there in the aisle of the church.  We only stayed a minute, respecting the privacy of this small, living church, and the few people who were there praying in it.           Besides, it was time for dinner.  Down again into the town, stopping at a tavern that had a menu posted, with people sitting at tables outside in the cooling dark.  Funny, it felt like we had stepped back a couple of centuries, sitting there on the street in the small town, a young family with some friends at the table next to us, their children and dogs playing on the cobblestones between the tables, the waitress wearing a nondescript tunic/dress, no cars, few lights and a sliver of waning moon.  It got cold, sitting there in our light jackets, but that made the steam rising from our meal when it was brought out all the more enjoyable.  Sad to say, I made the mistake of trying one of the house brews, and discovered once again that the Viennese like a sourness to their beer that I found distinctly distasteful.  But dinner was delicious otherwise, plentiful and filling.  Honest food to fill the emptiness that walking and hiking had left.           Finishing dinner, we strolled back to the car, pausing at a coffeeshop which was just getting ready to close, to get dessert to take back to the room with us.  But it was still early, and much too soon to retire for the night.  We decided to go see if we could find "Castle Liechtenstein". The little map we had showed that there was some sort of 'historic site' above Hinterbrühl that was marked as the 'Palace Liechtenstein'.  As best as we were able to determine, it was also at the site of some sort of retirement community.  We went that way, driving back and forth through a small warren of suburban streets, working our way back up the ridge of mountains, until we came to a small park-like entrance indicating that the retirement community was inside.  As we pulled in there, however, there was a large public parking area, with signs to the castle.  But the road continued on, and being basically lazy, I wanted to get closer.  Past a line of thick trees on the far edge of the parking lot, we rounded a bend, and suddenly came upon an absolutely picture-postcard shot of the castle, lit from below with powerful floodlamps.  Furthermore, it was reflected perfectly in the still surface of a small lake just off the road.  It was a good thing that there wasn't anyone right behind us, because I just stopped the car there in the middle of the road just past the trees, stunned by the site.           A fairy-tale castle, turrets and battlements, banners flying.  It sits, poised upon the tip of a rock outcropping, the soaring walls of the lower stories adding to the effect of the structure being higher than the clouds.  You really feel like you are looking up into the sky, upon the work of skilled magicians who know how to make buildings fly.  Sure, it was a trick of the lights, shining up from below, augmenting the overall impression of floating.  But it was also what the eyes wanted to see, what the heart imagined since childhood when castles were mentioned in stories of kings and grim tales of trolls.           Catching my breath, we drove down the road, trying to get closer.  Turns out that there is a retirement community there, a new adaptation of the grand old palace of the same Liechtenstein family which had built the castle a couple of hundred years before.  We drove around their driveways and parking lots until we found a place out of the way where we thought we could leave the car for a few minutes.  Crossing the open meadow between the palace and the castle, the cold dew soaking into our shoes, we kept looking up at that magical image, now towering over everything.  On the other side of the meadow we plunged into the trees at the base of the castle, and into darkness.  We were too close to the walls, and the light reflected back off the castle proper was shielded from us.  Groping in the darkness, trying to get our eyes to adjust, I cursed myself for leaving my bag back at the room (because I had a good mini-mag flashlight in it for such occasions).  Then I remembered, I had the keys to the car, and they had a small light built in the key.  It wasn't much, but it was enough to navigate by, until we got to the main path of the castle and up to the front gate.           It was closed, of course.  But by the light of the key we made out that it would open at 9 am.  We followed the path back to the meadow, deciding that the woods around the castle were rough enough that trying to wander through them at night wasn't smart.  We would come back in the morning.  We got back to the car, cold, feet wet, and tired.  But still we stopped back by the lake on the way out, and using a convenient boulder off the side of the road, Alix took a long exposure picture of the castle and it's reflection in the lake.  You couldn't ask for a better photo.           We got back to 'The Beethoven' worn out but not quite ready to crash.  The room was equipped with a small stocked refrigerator, and we stayed up, surfing the channels of the TV, drinking and eating our desserts, writing postcards to family and friends. Morning.  We were feeling a little time pressure, figured that we'd get an early breakfast, check out of the hotel, then go back to Castle Liechtenstein and look around the outside thoroughly before the place opened up, and be there ready to explore the inside when it did open.  We needed to catch a fairly early train in Vienna, and so would only have a couple of hours to see the inside of the castle.           Of course, wanting to get an early start condemned us.  Breakfast was supposed to be served starting at 7:30.  The sign out front in the lobby said that, and we confirmed it with the desk clerk when we checked in.  We loaded the car at about 7:20, went into the lobby to wait for the breakfast room to open.  The lobby was dark, the bar not really cleaned up properly, and the remains of a rather large party (which had been in full force when we came in to go to bed) was still visible in the lounge area behind the bar.  Hmmm.  I looked around behind the main desk for something that might signal a porter or some other form of help.  No luck.  A nice, modern computer, and a nice modern multifunction phone system, and I didn't have a clue about where to even start to summon someone.  We went back up to the room and tried to call the front desk.  That didn't help.  There just wasn't anyone around to be found anywhere.           Just about the time we were ready to give up on breakfast, go off somewhere and get something else, the manager came in through the front door.  He looked around, really confused as to the state of things, and then rushed to the phone system, punched some buttons, and began talking to someone in furious and agitated Austrian.  I couldn't follow a thing he said, but I was rather glad that a) I wasn't the one on the receiving end of the call, and b) he seemed to be doing something about getting us breakfast.  Sure enough, as soon as he put down the phone he apologized to us and the few other guests who had come down to the lobby, opened the breakfast area, and asked us to please take seats . . . they would get some food in to us right away.           Well, it wasn't right away, but they did get food to us.  Seems that he had called his wife, and between them they whipped up coffee and brotchen, eggs, cold cuts, and the normal breakfast fare.  His wife came in with the coffee, apologizing profusely:  the person responsible for breakfast had evidently not come in on time, she wasn't sure why not, perhaps some confusion over scheduling, and she was most sorry that we had to wait for so long.  I was too hungry, and too happy to get some coffee, to care much.  The food, when it arrived, was excellent and in generous supply, worthy of a four-star hotel.  And as I was sitting there, finishing the last of my breakfast, pure satisfaction came over me, since I was able to watch the unsuspecting, but very guilty, morning person come walking into the front of the building just about the same time the manager came out of the kitchen with another basket of fresh brotchen.           A few minutes later we were on the road to the Castle.  It was a clear, wonderful morning.  Nothing brightens the day quite like watching someone who so eminently deserves it getting chewed out.  Particularly when they had delayed my morning fix of coffee by almost an hour.           We got to the parking area, dropped off the car, being careful to take the necessary cameras, binoculars, et cetera with us.  Down an easy path, greeting the fine older folks from the retirement community out for a walk with their dogs, until once again we stood at the base of the castle walls there in the woods.  If anything, it was even more impressive in the light of day.  A small castle, nothing on the same scale as the castles we had visited in Kronach or Coburg, but by the same measure much more human, much more like a home where you could imagine yourself living, much more like the fairy-tale castles of one's youthful imagination than the grand dreadnoughts of war we had seen before.           I've described other structures as being built onto the living rock, and fairly so.  But this place was amazing.  It was at the top of an outcropping of rock that itself must have presented a formidable defensive structure.  And it used this rock as part of the structure, part of the design, part of the aesthetic of the place, in a way that seemed to be more like sculpture than architecture.  Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for what a good architect can do.  Living with one will help cultivate such an understanding.  But this castle was more of a work of art.  Around on the far side from the main gate was a very jagged crevice in the foundation stone, a dark band of rock between two higher areas of lighter stone, some two or three feet wide, sloping away at about a 40 degree angle.  The builders of the castle chose this spot to put in a little decorated archway in the wall, smaller than a man, where the main drainage of the castle exited.  The effect was to give the impression of a much larger, and more elaborate, gateway to some huge castle, as seen from a distance.  But of course that was an illusion; there was no way an attacking force could enter there, since they would have to carve through solid rock or substantial wall.           We went around the whole outside of the place, admiring the towers of the castle proper rising high above the walls.  These weren't large towers, such as you would find in the huge defensive structures built by Edward in Wales.  Rather, they were parts of the fortified house, corners and lookouts integrated into the living space.  Think of the trademark castle that Disney has in their theme parks, subtract the saccharine, and you get a better dea of the overall effect.  There was also a little balcony, with the supports designed as a lord and lady looking out from the walls.  In the place of frightening gargoyles were happy or humorous human faces, watching you from on high.  I was glad we brought the binoculars.           We got to enjoy and explore all the outside of the walls and finished up at the main gate just as the caretaker showed up to open the place.  He smiled at us, unlocked the doors, and told us to go on in and play around, since he had some things to do before he would be ready to take our admission money, and he would collect it from us on the way out.           First thing inside the gate it was clear that the visual elements, the artistry which went into the construction of the castle that we could see from outside the walls, was a theme continued throughout.  Again, the rock upon which the castle was built wasn't just a foundation, or a determining force.  Rather, it was sculpted into the walls, supported around and underneath by quarried stone.  A quick glance around the small courtyard there inside the front gate, no bigger than the front yard in any suburban home, and up stairs to the right and into the first floor of the building.  The castle itself was long and not very wide, with a main corridor running pretty much the length of the building, stairways at either end.  As the initial impression indicated, this was more a fortified house than a great keep designed to withstand siege engines.  The walls were only a few feet thick, with occasional arrow loops down the length of the corridor on the north side (the side facing away from the main courtyard), and chambers on the south side overlooking the courtyard.  The sensibility of this was elegant:  the rooms on the south would be warmed by the sun, and could overlook the courtyard there, where gardens could grow at the base of the castle proper, inside the walls.  Further, to the north was the valley, and these arrow loops therefore commanded a better field of fire.  Inside the corridor, as part of the design and decoration of the place, there were reliefs carved into the supporting arches, and likewise carvings in the walls and over the doorways to the chambers.  We went all the way to the far end, and there came upon a stairwell.  This wasn't just a large, utilitarian circular staircase, as was usual in most of the castles we visited.  Rather, it was a five-sided winding staircase with an open central shaft, with regular landings, giving a sense of spaciousness and grace to the stairs.  On all the supporting columns, and along the walls were more relief carvings and full sculptures.  In all these cases the decorations were taken from your standard medieval bestiary; griffins, dragons of several sorts, troll-like figures, and sea serpents, all jumbled up with humorous and common images of people.  Well, they may not actually have been all jumbled up, but rather put into a system or sequence that wasn't evident to us on a casual pass through.  At about this time we also noticed that the tiles in the floors had designs in them.  Sometimes these were hunting scenes, with stags, boar and dogs.  Other times the designs were purely geometric, like knotwork or some similar regular pattern.  Here and there, in areas where the elements and passage of many hands couldn't get to it very easily, was evidence of paint and whitewash.  This wasn't a military post.  This was a home.           Most of the rooms had the tiles I mentioned.  Some rooms, either having been partially repaired, or rather partially damaged by time, only had the raw wooden floor sitting on top of the supporting beams, without the tiles.  On the second floor of the castle were the main living quarters, and we explored these first.  The rooms were all labelled 'Knight's Room,' 'Lord's Room,' 'Priest's Quarters,' and so on.  In several of the rooms were items of furniture, at least some of it original, such as the wonderful stone table with the base made out of intertwined medieval dolphins, and the top fashioned to be a game table.  Another room held plank tables, a great chest with wrought iron strap hinges, and a very large, and very comfortable figure 'X' chair.  I think that the frame of the chair was original, though the fabric seat, armrests, and back were of more recent manufacture.  Modern banners made in the historical style were in many of the rooms, as were some tapestries and a few paintings.  From the large room (I would be overjoyed to have it as my master bedroom) of the lord of the castle projected that small balcony we had seen from outside the walls.  Stepping out onto it in the morning sun, we could survey the whole courtyard . . . and were delighted to be looking straight down into the stage of a small summer-stock type theatre.  Seems that the castle is used for plays put on by the local theatre group, the walls of the courtyard defining the limits of the stage.  What a backdrop!           We went up to the upper floor of the castle, which consisted mostly of a large room on top of the main keep at the western end of the structure.  This was the dormitory for the military personnel, simple, stark now, with little of the decorations found throughout the rest of the castle.  From there, there was a narrow circular staircase up into a lookout turret, with a small walk wound on the outside, facing south, west, and north, and from this considerable height it was easy to look down into the valley and even off past the mountains to Vienna.  We spent some time there, enjoying the view and the crisp wind coming up the mountain, and then went all the way down to the lowest level of the castle.           This was where the kitchen, storage areas and workshops were located.  In the kitchen (not marked) were fireplaces in the outside corners, and a large stone sink, big enough to wash a pig in.  There was a channel in the stone coming into the sink, which presumably at one time held lead piping leading to a cistern.  Heat and running water . . . all the comforts of home if you don't mind a little lead in your diet.           Back up to the first floor, which contained additional living quarters, a small hall, and the two-story high chapel.  Opening onto the chapel at the level of the second floor was a small balcony, where the family of the lord of the castle could come to view mass.  Other than that, since this was a ground-level room, the only light came in from a couple of small windows well up the wall.  And, interestingly, the door to the chapel was heavy timbers faced with iron, and could be barred from the inside, thereby making it more secure if attackers gained access to the main corridor.           It was all a delight on a human scale.  But we were pressed for time, and couldn't linger there.  We thanked the caretaker, paid our admission fee and bought a little booklet about the castle (they didn't have an English version . . . but the floorplans are excellent and my German is still good enough that I can crib notes from it), and left, looking back now and again as we walked to the car.  Pausing one more time to enjoy the view of the castle, we pulled out of the parking lot and headed back to Vienna. It was a fairly straightforward matter to get back into town, fill the tank of the rental car, and go to the train station.  We made arrangements for Hertz to pick the car up in the parking garage of the station, got the bags inside and to our platform, took care of the details of exchanging some money into Swiss Francs, getting travel snacks from one of the shops, contacting our friends in Switzerland to let them know the final information about our arrival, et cetera.  Walking through the huge, noisy train station on the way from seeing to these details, I felt strongly that I would not much miss Vienna, but would look forward to the day when I returned to Mödling, Hinterbrühl, and Castle Liechtenstein. PREVIOUS NEXT