Linz: Dead Saints, Doeners, and Dangerous Grape Leaves

The trip to Linz seems short. We start a game of Euchre and don’t even have time to finish before we arrive. At the train station, we grab our luggage and hop on the S-bahn. Everything is painless and uncomplicated here since we’re on Madeline’s home turf—all we have to do is follow her lead. The plan for Linz is for Mike to sleep on Madeline’s couch at her apartment. Kathy and I have a hotel room. At the Hauptplatz, Kathy and I get off to find our hotel while Mike and Madeline continue on to Madeline’s apartment. It is a short walk across the square to the Hotel Wolfinger. We find that the hotel entrance and reception area are on the second floor and, in light of our luggage/stent situation, we search vainly for an elevator. There is no elevator. The building predates elevators by several centuries. So we haul our luggage up the stairs to the small reception area, complete the check-in formalities, then cross a second-story walking bridge over a courtyard to our room. The room and its furnishings are—simply old—lots of antiques, but also some late garage sale items. But the plumbing is modern—a perfect blend of quaintness and functionality. The Hotel Wolfinger was originally a 16th century nunnery. Sleeping in a structure that was built just as the Middle Ages were waning and was formerly inhabited by nuns is a unique and new experience for me.

Ensconced in Wolfinger Room

The hotel faces the Hauptplatz, the largest public square in Austria. The most visually significant object in the square is the Dreifaltigkeitssäule, or The Pillar to the Holy Trinity, a 65-foot white marble column. The column was erected in 1723 in thanksgiving for deliverance from the Turks, the fire of 1712, and the plague of 1713. A collection of sidewalk cafes fills the east side of the square, and that’s where we go next. Mike joins us, since Madeline has a phone interview for a potential job. The weather is still a little cool, but pleasant, and we enjoy our coffee, conversation, and people watching.

Dreifaltigkeitssäule

Later, Madeline joins us for dinner at a Greek restaurant, “El Greco,” on the Hauptplatz near the hotel. We feel a little disjointed being Americans ordering Greek food in Austria. The restaurant has menus in English if you ask, but maybe someone unfamiliar with Greek food and not very adept with English wrote them. Or maybe they were translated from German to English with Google Translate. Baklava is listed in the English menu as “nut strudel”, strangely accurate, but also sort of amusing. “Grape leaves” appear on the English menu as “Hazardous Grape Leaves.” On Madeline’s German menu the operational word is “gef”, an abbreviation for "gefüllt," meaning "filled." But the English translator must have assumed that “gef” meant "gefährlich" which means "dangerous." Regardless, the food is great, and we all get a complementary shot of ouzo with our check!

Tuesday morning is low key. Kathy and I have an excellent breakfast at the Wolfinger. Since this is the week before Easter, our eggs are hard-boiled colored eggs. After breakfast, Kathy goes out for a wander—she spends some time hiking around the picturesque streets of the Alstadt and finally winds up by the Danube where she sees Mike out for a morning run, and some swans. I stay in our room—the walking thing is just not working for me.

We have our lunch at a doener place. Madeline has talked about doeners ever since her first experience in Germany. It’s probably the preeminent German fast food—and actually outsells sausages in Austria. Doeners, while Turkish in origin, are a true German food in the same sense that hamburgers (hamburger original meaning = from Hamburg) and hot dogs (wiener original meaning = from Vienna) are true American foods. It’s a matter of controversy what exactly should be in an authentic doener, and I don’t claim to be an expert, but here’s what I came up with in my Google search: The basic ingredient is meat roasted on a vertical spit—same as you would use in gyros or shwerma. For a doener, the meat may be lamb, or it may be veal, turkey or even pork. The meat goes into fladenbrot. A direct translation of “fladenbrot”, I suppose, is “flat bread.” Google Translate translates “fladenbrot” to “pita bread.” But the doener I’m eating is not in pita bread—it is more like focaccia or ciabatta. Additionally, you may find lettuce, cucumbers, onions, red cabbage, white cabbage, tomatoes, garlic sauce and chili sauce in various combinations depending on where you buy your doener. All I can say for sure is that my one doener lunch experience has convinced me that they could be very addicting. Madeline, who has been craving various American foods that aren’t available in Austria will probably return to America and develop cravings for doeners.

The plan for the afternoon is to go to the little nearby town of St. Florian and visit the abbey there. I had read that St. Florian’s Abbey was one of the premier examples of baroque architecture in all of Austria. But it is out of the way, I remain unsure of how we will get there, and the others are less than enthused about going. We take the S-bahn to the bus station and find that the buses run to St. Florian irregularly and they take a long time to get there because of frequent stops. So we take a taxi. I prepare for St. Florian’s Abbey to be totally lame, requiring my profuse apologies to the others for their expense and effort. I needn’t have worried. St. Florian’s turns out to be awesome, in the actual sense of the word. We are all awed.

St. Florian was a 4th century Christian martyr, a Roman official who would not renounce his faith even after torture and upon threat of death. He was finally dragged to a bridge and thrown into the river with a millstone tied around his neck. A pious matron dragged his body out of the river and buried him in a secret Christian graveyard. Around the year 800, a monastery was built at the site of his burial. Though the various buildings have been replaced or altered through the years, there has been a church and monastery on this site since then. The current baroque complex was built around a pre-existing gothic structure in 1686. In the intervening 300+ years, this complex of buildings with all of its statuary, gold, woodcarvings, and frescoes has survived the travails of time and two world wars and is every bit as beautiful today as when it was first constructed.

The church’s main pipe organ is a magnificent instrument with 7343 pipes. It is now referred to as the “Bruckner Organ” since it is the organ that Anton Bruckner played on as the church organist before he became famous as an organist and composer. Today he is interred in a tomb directly below the organ that bears his name. The phenomenal library, with its two-story high walnut shelves and frescoed ceilings contains 135,000 volumes, many of which are hand-written manuscripts that predate the printing press.

There is a small gift shop/book store in the Abbey where we are able to book a tour. Our tour guide is a local woman who is worried about her ability to explain things to us in English, since she usually does the tour in German. She is great. She carries around a big jangly ring of large old-fashioned keys and takes us behind locked doors to see, among other things, Bruckner’s tomb, an ossuary containing the bones of 6000 people who had chosen to be buried near the saint and whose bones were excavated in the 13th century, the imperial chambers—rooms for important guests, the Marble Hall with its monumental ceiling fresco, and the opulent library, where, unfortunately, photography is not allowed (but you can see it at this website.)

St. Florians Collegiate Church Choir Stalls

Bruckner Organ

Touring St.Florians Marble Hall

Marble Hall Ceiling Fresco

While Madeline thoroughly enjoys the tour, I think the highlight of the day for her is her discovery and purchase in the bookshop of a crazy book called “Struwwelpeter”, a book of cautionary tales for children. “Struwwelpeter” obviously comes from the same culture that brought us Grimm’s Fairy Tales, where children are eaten by hungry wolves and thrown in ovens by evil witches. In this book, children suffer ghastly consequences as a result of misbehavior. The little boy who sucks his thumb has his thumbs cut off by a crazed scissors-wielding tailor (because tailors do that, right?) The little girl whose kittens warn her not to play with matches does so anyway and is reduced to a pile of ashes. (At least the kittens cry at the end—they could have said, “Told you so!”) And the little boy who refuses to eat his soup ends up starving to death. (That’ll teach him! Oh wait, he’s dead.) Anyway, this book is so bizarre that Madeline and Mike chuckle over it all the way back to Linz. Here’s a YouTube video that gives you the flavor of the book.

Reading Struwwelpeter at the Bus Stop

Shortly after getting back to Linz we have dinner at Chindia—this time around we are Americans eating Chinese and Indian food in Austria. At least this time it is a buffet so we don’t have to deal with menus translating Indian and Chinese food descriptions from German to English. Madeline’s friends William, Josh, and Ross join us for the meal. It is fun to meet some of the friends that Madeline has been telling us (and blogging) about. The guys are great, and so is the dinner. We finish with a complimentary shot of schnapps then Kathy and I head to our hotel and bed, while all the young folk go in search of a bar.