Admont Abbey
Stift Admont
Interesting facts
- Forty-eight windows light the library hall so effectively that no artificial lighting has ever been installed there.
- In 2017 the library announced two parchment fragments of the Abrogans, a Latin–Old High German glossary from around 800, once reused in a book binding.
- Josef Stammel's carved group of the Four Last Things, Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven, predates the Enlightenment ceiling and deliberately contrasts with it.
- The shelves follow a plan: theology in the northern half, the secular sciences in the southern half, and Bibles and Church Fathers beneath the central dome.
- The manuscript collection includes the fifteenth-century Admont Bartholomew, an important source for the history of medicine.
- The name Admont comes from the Latin ad montes, meaning at the mountains.
- The abbey was founded on lands left by Hemma of Gurk, a noblewoman later venerated as a saint.
- The Nazi regime dissolved the monastery and expelled the monks, who were only able to return in 1946.
- The natural history museum holds more than 250,000 insect specimens, much of it gathered after the 1865 fire by Father Gabriel Strobl.
Why it is worth it
Admont Abbey, in the Enns valley of Styria at the gateway to the Gesäuse mountains, is the oldest surviving monastery in the province, founded in 1074 by Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg, and a Benedictine community still lives here. But it is known across the world for one room: its library hall, the largest monastic library in the world, which earlier admirers did not hesitate to call the eighth wonder of the world.
The hall was completed in 1776 to a plan by the architect Josef Hueber, and it was conceived entirely in the spirit of the Enlightenment, in which light meant knowledge. It is some 70 metres long, 14 metres wide and 13 metres high, with tall windows letting daylight flood the gilded late-baroque shelving that holds around 70,000 of the abbey's 200,000 volumes. Seven ceiling cupolas carry frescoes painted by Bartolomeo Altomonte when he was about eighty, among them an allegory of the dawn of reason in which Aurora and the geniuses of language wake the dreaming Morpheus. The sculptures are by the abbey's own sculptor, Josef Stammel, whose carved figures bring a vivid drama to the room. The abbey also keeps more than 1,400 manuscripts, many medieval, and close to a thousand incunabula and early printed books.
The library was the one great space to survive the fire of 1865, which destroyed nearly the whole monastery including its archive; the church was rebuilt in neo-Gothic style by Wilhelm Bücher, with twin towers 67 metres high. Since 2003 the abbey has also housed a large museum over four floors, with art from the Middle Ages to the present and a natural history collection rebuilt after the fire by Father Gabriel Strobl, whose collection of some 80,000 flies is among the most important in Europe.
Getting there
The abbey stands in the market town of Admont in the Enns valley, at the entrance to Gesäuse National Park, about 52 km from Steyr. Linz Airport (LNZ) is about 76 km away by straight line; Graz (GRZ) is about 98 km and Salzburg (SZG) about 112 km.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Admont Abbey is a Benedictine monastery located on the Enns River in the town of Admont, Styria, Austria. The oldest remaining monastery in Styria, Admont Abbey says it contains the largest monastic library in the world as well as a long-established scientific collection. It is known for its Baroque architecture, art, and manuscripts.
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