Preliminary Programme

The traditional utilization of the square around St. Stephen’s Cathedral as a cemetery and its architectural conception as a closed area around the main parish church of Vienna suggest that this was a self–contained space used only for Christian–liturgical purposes.
But this explanation neglects the dynamic relations between square and cathedral, which resulted particularly from functional diversification in the course of the Middle Ages: as parish church, as seat of the university and a collegiate chapter, as royal burial place of the Habsburg dynasty, as well as, since 1480, as bishop’s see.
These transformations caused on the one hand a rearrangement of the architectural space within and probably also outside the church, and, on the other hand, brought about the presence of diverse social groups – such as the parish clergy, the entourage of the bishop, scholars and students of different nations, canons, strangers, citizens and parish members. This implies that the “public” character of the space needs to be given greater attention than has been the case until now.
The research project’s intention is to illustrate the different functional conceptions and actions with reference to architectural changes.
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Thanks to newly surveyed and catalogued material of the two Greek communities of Vienna (St. George, founded around 1723, Holy Trinity, founded in 1786) and of the Archives of the City of Vienna, we are now in a position to take up again the particular case of Vienna. Here the differentiation principle among the Christian merchants who immigrated from the Balkans is constructed formally around citizenship (Ottoman vs. Habsburg). Although two sometimes rival communities with two separate church buildings developed, the area where the so called “Greek merchants” settled was the same. Their stores and domiciles were located in a clearly defined area in the streets around “Alter Fleischmarkt”, which was a vital part of Vienna’s “economic city” (on the axis Wipplingerstraße-Hoher Markt-Fleischmarkt) - a situation that remained unchanged for many decades throughout the 19th century. When given the opportunity through Joseph II’s tolerance policy, the Greeks with Habsburg citizenship started shaping urban space in this area among other things by the systematic acquisition of buildings in the neighbourhood, while Ottoman subjects were denied this privilege and had to rely on the economic cooperation of their “Austrian fellow-Greeks” if they wanted to invest in immovable property.
The paper discusses how the appearance of urban space reflects the positioning of an ethnic and religious minority within urban society.
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What do the written sources reveal about the process of building the Church of St Stephen in Vienna? How did this process change or stabilise medieval society? And how did construction work influence contemporary perceptions of affiliation and the formation of communities or groups?
St Stephen’s in Vienna. Architecture of the Written Sources approaches these questions with the first systematic examination of the written sources in the church’s two-hundred-year research history. It undertakes, firstly, a problem-orientated analysis which relates architectural-archaeological evidence and petrographical findings to the “architecture of the written sources”. This draws attention to inconsistencies or gaps in the source material, and, where necessary, proposes solutions. The project’s second focal point is the comparative investigation of contemporary perceptions of affiliation and community formation in the erection of individual sections of the building. This means addressing the combined efforts of the social-cultural groups involved in the architectural enterprise, as well as the multi-facetted symbolic content of St Stephen’s.

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An instrument in maintaining the delicate balance between attachment to the home culture and integration to the host culture were the endowments and foundations of Greek-Orthodox residents of the Habsburg Empire. The focus of the paper will be on the until now marginally discussed and unpublished material on foundations and endowments of both Greek-Orthodox communities of Vienna. An important part of the endowments was in the form of revenues from buildings in the „Greek“ neighbourhood and the adjacent neighbourhoods in the city of Vienna. The Greek-Orthodox communal authorities processed and administrated these endowments in cooperation with the Habsburg authorities and the recipient communities. As the legal framework of the central administration developed in the late 18th and early 19th century and enforced specific forms of investment for endowments in banks of the city of Vienna, this material offers valuable insight both into the interdependence of financial and social integration of migrants and into the memorial process.

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