“Votivkirche,” or, “it’s hard to take pretty pictures while also writing final papers”

So my time here in Austria is coming to an end.1 As a bit of a last hurrah with the folks I’ve been here studying abroad with, a couple of us went over to Votivkirche, the big fancy church you see above that we saw every Tuesday and Thursday on our commute to and from the University of Vienna campus where we were taking German.

Once you get inside – and, despite the construction that I managed to avoid showing in the exterior photo above, it was open to the public – you can see some massive chandeliers hanging around the place.

They are, of course, hanging from some gorgeously high ceilings.

I need a vertical picture to make it clear how pretty it was, seriously.

Up front, currently tucked behind a big projection screen, is a lovely little altar. I was enjoying that, in order to preserve space in the church proper, they have the projector itself set up behind the screen… sitting on the altar.

We also took a bit of a detour getting back – we tried to see Stock im Eisen, a tree made out of nails2 but there was a protest happening in front of it, for some reason, so we wound up going to see the alternative – a knight made out of nails.3

Assuming I’ve put this post up when I want to – it might be running a bit behind, because I’ve been fiddling with things again. ↩

Or something? I remain unclear. ↩

Fun story: it was used as a fundraiser during both World Wars, with people paying to have the honor/privilege/whatever to hammer a nail into the statue. The statue itself was for WWI; the base was added to continue the whole idea during WWII. ↩