Melk Abbey

Last Friday a special visitor and I traveled to the town of Melk to see Melk Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that has been around for over 1000 years. It was first a residence of the Babenberg family, and since 1089 it has been a Benedictine monastery. The present structure was built in the Baroque style between 1702 and 1736 by Jacob Prandtauer (all this historical information is coming from the little brochure we got at the abbey, not from my head). But anyway, it was amazing. It was very easy to get there from Vienna, only a little over an hour on the train. And we bought a ticket called the "Einfach-Raus" ("Easily/Simply-Out") ticket, which was 28 euros for the both of us for the whole day, so it was a pretty good deal. But the Einfach-Raus ticket is especially cool, because you can have up to 5 people on the same ticket, and it's just a flat price of 28 euros for transportation on all the regional and regional express trains around Vienna for the whole day, so it only ends up being a little over 5 euros per person if you have 5 people! So anyway, we arrived at the Melk train station, and we saw the abbey immediately as we were pulling in, which was pretty exciting. The abbey is on top of a big hill that towers over the tiny little town. The weather could not have been more perfect. The sky was perfectly blue, with puffy white clouds, and the contrast of the deep golden yellow of the abbey walls against the sky was beautiful. I wore a heavy jacket there, but it turned out to be unnecessary, since I was perfectly warm in just my light sweater.

View of the side of the abbey from Melk's town center.

View of the front of the abbey from along the water (a branch of the Danube).

To get to the abbey, we hiked up to the top of the big hill. We walked through the entrance (below) and through two courtyards until we reached the visitors' center, where we found out that there would be a tour in about an hour. We explored the grounds and the town a little bit until then.

View over the gardens of the abbey.

Courtyard within the abbey.

Since it's not yet the busy tourist season for the abbey (that's in the summer), we had a very small tour group of only four people. For the first part of the tour, we walked through the former Imperial Rooms, which have been converted into a museum. There are many extremely old relics and objects on display there, like the chest with the extensive lock system in the picture below. Other examples of the objects on display are: a pocket-sized hand-written "travel" prayer book in Latin (so you know it's old..), priest garments weaved with gold (one of which, if I remember correctly, weighed close to 50 pounds because of all the gold), a golden cross with "a real piece of wood from the cross of Jesus" inside. It was all very interesting and fun to see.

Staircase inside the entrance.

Old chest with an unbelievably complex system of locks. The key that you can see hanging down in the middle turns every single one of the locks in the network to unlock the chest. It felt like something you would only see in a movie.

After walking through the museum, we entered the Marmorsaal, or Marble Hall. This part of the abbey was designed with the royal family in mind. When they would travel between Salzburg and Vienna, which was about a day's journey, Melk was often their rest stop. They had gatherings and dinners in the Marble Hall. The big metal grate in the center of the floor was where the heating came from.

Marmorsaal.

Ceiling painting in the Marmorsaal.

From the Marble Hall we exited onto a balcony, which gave us a really great view of the town of Melk and of the church at the abbey.

In front of the church.

View over Melk.

The next part of the tour was through the library, where they keep tons and tons of books. The oldest book in the collection, which was lying open in a glass display class so that we could see the pages, was 1100 years old. It was pretty cool. There were two levels of shelves and shelves of books, and we only saw 2 of the 8 or 9 rooms that make up the library.

The library, with our tour guide on the right and one of our fellow tourists on the left.

Cool giant globe in the library.

To get to the church, the last part of the tour, we walked down a spiral staircase, which had a mirror at the bottom, so that it gave the illusion of being never-ending. The church was one of the most ornate and impressive things I have ever seen. I can say with a good amount of certainty that I have never seen so much gold in one place in my whole life. All of the statues, balconies, ornamentation, etc. was covered in gold. There was not an inch of ceiling space that was not painted. I would say that a visit to Melk is a must if one is in Vienna.

Spiral staircase.

Main altar of the church.

The painted dome and vaulted ceilings.