Melk Abbey
Benediktinerstift Melk
Interesting facts
- A fire in 1297 destroyed much of the medieval abbey, but the monks managed to save most of the manuscripts.
- After a fire in 1974 damaged the interiors, a restoration lasting until 1995 used about eight pounds of gold to regild statues and altars.
- In 2019 a librarian found a parchment strip with some 60 partial lines of Der Rosendorn, a medieval German poem copied around 1300.
- In the late 18th century the abbey was a centre of Enlightenment thought, and some of its monks belonged to a Masonic lodge.
- The abbey school was confiscated under Nazi rule; it was returned after the war and now teaches nearly 900 boys and girls.
- Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, later a teacher of Beethoven, served as the abbey's organist from 1759 to 1766.
- The abbey suffered heavy damage during the Ottoman invasion of 1683, less than twenty years before the Baroque rebuilding began.
- Patrick Leigh Fermor made Melk a high point of A Time of Gifts, his account of walking across Europe in the 1930s.
- Austria issued a 10 euro silver coin in 2007 showing the abbey church's facade, twin towers and dome.
Why it is worth it
Seen from the Danube, Melk Abbey looks less like a monastery than a palace laid along a rock above the river, with twin towers and a great dome at its western end. Benedictine monks from Lambach moved into a castle here in 1089, given to them by Margrave Leopold II, and the site was already the burial place of the Babenbergs, Austria's first ruling dynasty, and of Saint Coloman. In the fifteenth century Melk led a reform movement that renewed monastic life across Austria and southern Germany, and its scriptorium made the library famous. Umberto Eco paid tribute by naming the narrator of The Name of the Rose Adso of Melk.
The building that stands today was begun in 1702 by abbot Berthold Dietmayr and his architect Jakob Prandtauer, who ran the works until his death in 1726; his nephew Joseph Munggenast finished them. It is the largest monastic complex of the Austrian Baroque, with a main axis some 320 metres long. Visitors pass through a gate flanked by bastions into a trapezoidal courtyard that draws the eye straight to the church dome, then along the Imperial Corridor, nearly 200 metres long and hung with portraits of every Babenberg and Habsburg ruler.
The high points come in sequence. The Marble Hall, intended for the imperial court, has a ceiling fresco of 1731 by Paul Troger in which Pallas Athena rides a chariot drawn by lions while Hercules strikes down the hound of hell. A terrace with wide views over the river leads to the library, where Troger painted a matching allegory of Faith above rooms holding around 100,000 volumes, some 1,800 manuscripts from the ninth century onward and 750 incunabula; in 1997 a fragment of a thirteenth-century copy of the Nibelungenlied turned up here. Last comes the abbey church of Saints Peter and Paul, a barrel-vaulted hall under a 64-metre dome, frescoed by Johann Michael Rottmayr and blazing with gilding, widely counted among the most beautiful Baroque churches in Austria.
The abbey escaped the dissolutions of Joseph II, still houses a working community and runs a school with roots in the twelfth century. It forms part of the Wachau Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site, and it is a favourite stop for cyclists on the Danube route.
Getting there
The abbey stands above the small town of Melk on the Danube. The nearest larger city is Sankt Pölten, about 23 km away. Linz-Hörsching Airport (LNZ) is about 85 km away. The abbey has a large car park and a bicycle park with luggage lockers for cyclists on the Danube route.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Melk Abbey is a Benedictine abbey above the town of Melk, Lower Austria, on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Danube river, adjoining the Wachau valley, that belongs to the Austrian Congregation. The abbey contains the tomb of Saint Coloman of Stockerau and the remains of several members of the House of Babenberg, Austria's first ruling dynasty.
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