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Österreich Klösterreich

The fourth installation of my column for the The Cambridge Language Collective

The Magna Mater Austriae, Ungariae and Bohemiae: Mariazell


As I head into my final three weeks in Vienna, I rather feel as if the end of the Year Abroad has jumped out of nowhere, gleefully poking its head round the door of the Kaffeehäuser, scorching me with seemingly endless days of over 30-degree heat, and forcing me to say Auf Wiedersehen to dear friends with whom I have had the pleasure of sharing the joys and struggles of the past year with. One of the most clichéd things that returning Year Abroad students tend to do, alongside constantly reminding people of their travels and covering their Fourth Year rooms with South American tapestries, is claim that they ‘found themselves’ abroad. As the summer semester draws to a close, my friends here have inevitably been asking me about my favourite memories, unexpected discoveries, and lessons that I’ll be taking back with me from Vienna, and it’s hard not to slip into those clichéd phrases.


I’m yet to come up with a concise answer to any of these questions, and indeed a catch-up over coffee seems to be the best way of attempting to do justice to them. There are a myriad of things I’ve learned this year, impossible to summarise briefly. Some of them are mundane (finding washing up gloves in Vienna is a near-impossible task), some of them rather random (a side product of my Year Abroad has been improving my Dutch), and of some of them slightly more profound (maintaining long distance friendships requires a lot of effort). But to avoid this turning into an emotional farewell letter or a detailed description of Austrian supermarkets (both of which might follow in due course), I thought I’d focus on one of the more unexpected aspects of my Year Abroad. And I’m not referring to Brexit, or even the most disruptive of factors - the pandemic, but rather my discovery of what my Austrian Cultural History professor recently termed Österreich Klösterreich (Austria Cloister-ia?).

The many monasteries (Klöster) of Central Europe, and Austria in particular, have fulfilled a variety of roles throughout history, serving as important religious, cultural, and literary centres. In the early Middle Ages the vast majority of literature produced was clerical and in Latin, and anything which was written in German still had a religious or spiritual subject matter. Monasteries such as the majestic Benedictine Stift Melk, rising up over the Danube, or Stift Admont, hold extensive collections of manuscripts and books, housed in libraries so sumptuously decorated that it feels like a Disney princess, rather than a bearded monk, will swing open the hidden door at any moment. For hundreds of years the rhythm of monastic life has continued uninterrupted; the monks convening throughout the day to pray and worship together, following the Benedictine rule of life, ora et labora et lege – Pray, work, and read. Many monasteries also have adjoining schools where the monks teach (the Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter was educated at the Gymnasium in Kremsmünster), and some are self-sustaining communities, with garden kitchens and breweries.


At some point over the many months of lockdown, I realised that places of worship were one of the only places which were still open for visitors, and thus began my tour of Austrian monasteries. I spent a very contemplative few days in Kremsmünster in February, waking up to the tolling of bells and the smell of manure, and scampering to Mass as the sun was barely rising at 6.30am. My friends always joke about my Sound of Music lifestyle, and this was almost dangerously true this time. There was something about temporarily stepping out of the hectic buzz of daily life and joining the steady pace of life in Kremsmünster, marked with regular prayer and community time, which was deeply refreshing. It is easy to think of such monasteries as places to escape to, a shelter from the problems and stresses of the modern world. While this is certainly true to some extent, I have come to realise that they are also places of great strength and peace, outward-looking communities which provide a steadfast point of reference no matter what turbulence or challenges society may be facing.


At the start of June I joined a group of students in walking part of Austria’s pilgrimage route, the Via Sacra, to the great basilica of Mariazell. Over the course of three days, we hiked through the woods and countryside, struggled up vertiginous inclines, and had many good conversations with one another. It was certainly a physically exhausting experience, but one too that provided me with the time and space to reflect on a lot of the past year, as well as to deepen my friendship with the other students. After approximately 80 kilometres, an astonishing amount of cured sausages (the preferred Austrian hiking snack), and many hills later, as we made the final approach we could see the Basilica nestled in the valley below. As if to cleanse us sweaty mortal beings before our arrival on the hallowed land, the heavens opened, breaking the spell of good weather we had enjoyed for the entirety of the trip thus far. After sheltering for a beautiful Mass in the Basilica we made a dash to the train station and scrambled on board what turned out to be the slowest (but most scenic) train back to Vienna, which trundled through every rural village along the way.


This time of year is always characterised by closure and change. The coming weeks and months will see some of my friends graduate, relocate to new cities, start exciting new projects, and I’ll even be embarking on a cross-European train ride to a Polish wedding. It’s tempting to want to cling on to this phase of life, to bask in the sunshine and delights of an opened-up city and not want to resume the constant essay-writing of Cambridge. It’s hard to say goodbye to my friends here, to leave the Viennese Kaffeehäuser behind.

Yet I know that adventure awaits us in Cambridge, albeit it perhaps more supervision than schnitzel-based, and I can’t help but think that my pilgrimage to Mariazell provided the perfect metaphor and cliché to end this column with: it really was the journey that mattered most.


A selection of snaps from the KHG Wallfahrt nach Mariazell 2021.

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