St Stephen's Cathedral audio guide,
five stops, free.

Stand far enough back on the square to take in the whole west front, and you will see it is not one building but several, stacked. The dark wall around the doorway and the two slim towers either side of it are the oldest things you will see today: Romanesque work of about 1230 to 1250, from the church that stood here before the Gothic cathedral grew up around it and swallowed it. The tall pointed window above the door was only broken through that old wall around 1420. And the great tower rising behind on your right, the Steffl, belongs to the Gothic church.

The doorway is the Riesentor, the Giant's Door. The colourful explanation is a bone. In the fifteenth century, while the foundations of the North Tower were being dug, workmen found an enormous thighbone, in fact a mammoth's, and since it could only have come from a giant, it was hung up in the porch. The dull explanation, which the cathedral's own support association prefers, is the Middle High German word risen, to sink or to fall, because the portal funnels inwards, each arch set deeper than the last.

The opening is only 2.4 metres wide. In November 1711, when the old Pummerin bell was hauled here from the foundry, it would not go through: the door posts had to come out, and a square was cut from the bottom of the carved tympanum and put back afterwards. In October 1957 the new Pummerin came in the same way, and again stones had to be removed.

Look up into that tympanum. Christ sits in an almond-shaped frame as ruler of the world, an angel either side, and one of his knees is bare. Nobody knows why; one theory links it to initiation rites in the medieval masons' lodges. Below him dragons, lions and basilisks crawl through the frieze, the powers of evil kept outside the door, and the carved interlace on the columns was meant to bind them there.

The two towers are the Heidentürme, the Heathen Towers, probably because they were built with stone from an old Roman wall, heathen work to a medieval Christian. They are 65.3 and 66.3 metres high and a metre different in width.

Before you go in, look at the wall to the left of the door. Two iron bars are set into the stone: the Viennese ells, the city's legal lengths for linen and for cloth, 89.6 and 77.6 centimetres, where anyone could check a merchant's measure. The round hollow above them is said to show the size a loaf of bread had to be. It is only a worn fitting for the door.

Walk up to the second pillar on the left and look for the stone flower. It is the best description anyone has found for this pulpit: the basket where the preacher stood bursts out of its stem like a blossom, carved from a fine, pale sandstone from Breitenbrunn, between about 1510 and 1515.

It stands out here in the nave, against a pillar, instead of up at the front, for a practical reason. Sermons were preached in the language of the congregation, and before microphones the preacher had to be among the people to be heard at all.

Four faces look out from the basket: the four Fathers of the Latin Church, and each one is also one of the four temperaments and one of the four ages of life. From the left, Augustine with his inkwell is the melancholic; Pope Gregory the Great, holding a magnifying glass, the phlegmatic; Jerome in his cardinal's hat, the choleric; Ambrose, the sanguine.

Now follow the stair as it winds round the pillar. The handrail is alive. Frogs and lizards crawl up it, biting one another: the lizards, who come out into the sun, stand for good, and the frogs, who keep to the swamp, for evil. At the top, where the preacher stepped in, sits a small stone dog, the little dog without fear, there to make sure none of them gets any further.

Then look down to the foot of the stair, and find the man at the window. He leans out of a stone opening in a cap, holding a pair of compasses, the tool of a master builder, and he looks rather sure of himself. The Viennese call him the Fenstergucker, the window-gazer. For centuries he was taken for the cathedral master Anton Pilgram, because Pilgram's mason's mark is carved on the little shield above him, and the whole thing was called the Pilgram pulpit. That attribution is debated. The design is now more often given to a master working in the manner of the great Netherlandish sculptor Niclaes Gerhaert van Leyden, with Pilgram perhaps among the carvers; and the newest research says the window-gazer may be Pilgram after all.

Under him you can read the letters REN. A. D. 1880. That is the restorers' signature, from the campaign under Friedrich von Schmidt that took the pulpit apart and stripped off its old oil paint, and with it, sadly, every trace of the original colour.

It is still used, in Advent and in Lent. On the seventh of October 1938, under Nazi rule, Cardinal Innitzer preached to the young people of Vienna from this basket. The next day the Hitler Youth stormed the archbishop's palace.

Three hundred and forty-three steps, and you are in the Türmerstube, the watchmen's room, sixty-seven metres above Stephansplatz. It is the highest point of the cathedral open to visitors. Above you the tower carries on for almost seventy metres more, to 136.4 metres at the tip, and only the staff of the cathedral works go further, climbing out at about a hundred and ten metres onto an iron ladder on the outside.

For 421 years someone was on duty in this room. From 1534, five years after the first Ottoman siege, the city kept a fire watchman up here. If he saw a fire, he waved a red flag towards it by day or a red lantern by night, called the alarm down to the streets through a tin speaking-trumpet, and sent a written message down a tube to the tower master below, who alerted the fire guard. The last watchman came down on the thirty-first of December 1955. And in 1529 and again in 1683, with Ottoman armies outside the walls, this tower was the main observation and command post for the defence of the city.

It went up fast at the end. Duke Rudolf the Fourth laid the foundation stone in 1359, but by about 1400 the tower stood only twenty metres high. The remaining hundred metres and more rose in roughly thirty years, to the design of Peter von Prachatitz, and were finished under Hans von Prachatitz in 1433. For six years, until Strasbourg completed its minster tower in 1439, nothing in continental Europe was taller.

The very top is not medieval. French guns damaged the spire in 1809, and a repair between 1839 and 1842 made things worse: the stone ornament was hung on an iron core, the iron rusted, and the rust burst the stones. In 1860 the top was taken down, and Friedrich von Schmidt rebuilt it in stone, the medieval way, between 1862 and 1864. On the eighteenth of August 1864, the emperor's birthday, a new cross and eagle went up. Before that the tip had carried a sun and a crescent moon, which after the siege of 1529 looked uncomfortably Ottoman to the Viennese; it took until 1686 to replace them.

The tower has sunk about thirty centimetres into the ground under its own weight, though that movement stopped long ago, and after about thirty years of restoration it has stood free of scaffolding since the autumn of 2025.

Now look down at the roof. Two hundred and thirty thousand glazed tiles, laid in zigzags over the nave, on a slope that reaches eighty degrees at its steepest, so steep that the rain washes it clean and snow slides off before it can hide the colours. And over the choir, on this south side, the tiles form a double-headed eagle, the arms of the Austrian Empire, with the year 1831.