In these days of abundant travel, when anyone can go anywhere with a credit card and an advanced booking, exclusive access makes an experience particularly special. That’s what distinguished our visit to the Benedictine abbey of Göttweig.
Anyone can visit the abbey during the day, and it’s well worth the effort. It’s known as the Austrian Montecassino because of its lofty, isolated position and the stunning views from its terraces. The layout is based on the Escorial in Spain, and the interiors are blockbuster Baroque, including one of the largest painted staircases in Austria. It looks over the Wachau Valley, so gorgeous in both landscape and architecture the whole landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But thanks to our excursion with Viking Cruises, we entered after the place closed to the public. Being there in the early evening meant the light was exquisite and the surroundings silent. A sense of peace prevailed. I would have signed up on the spot to return for one of their residential prayer retreats had a monk popped up to give me the hard sell. (Given that our brother school, where my mother once taught, was a Benedictine priory, I have a soft spot for the brothers in black robes in any case.) Göttweig is spectacularly beautiful; the conditions pushed it to magical.
We had a local guide with us for the drive up to the abbey, who then took us into the church. We’d toured Melk earlier in the day, the magnificence of which certainly risked making Göttweig a pale second. Not so. The church here is far simpler, but in some ways better for it. Melk was all about drama and show, while Göttweig felt like a place for contemplation. That’s not to say it wasn’t also spectacular, with virtuoso paint effects on its walls and ceiling and an altar of writhing, golden, Baroque magnificence. Unique, in my experience, were the barley twist columns on either side of the altar piece in a duck egg blue, shimmering as if they were glass Christmas ornaments. I was mesmerised.
We’d return to the church later, but next we crossed the inner courtyard … framed on three sides with a horseshoe of buildings but the fourth left open to the stunning landscape, letting God have a hand in the design …to the palatial wing with the ceremonial staircase. And palatial is an appropriate word to use here, since the royal family treated abbeys as their homes away from home when they travelled around their dominions. The monks were the caretakers of these adjunct palaces, not their residents. They would have occupied something far more austere in another wing.
The staircase is as good as promised, an enormous white way climbing from two sides, combining into one, beneath the painted ceiling.
The lack of colour below the roofline emphasises the magnificence of the fresco above, a rather ludicrous depiction of the Emperor Charles VI as Apollo. As flattering as the artist Paul Troger could be … and you assume it was in his job description to sex the emperor up … Charles was no Greek god. It doesn’t matter, however. The whole thing is such a pastel-coloured scene of joyfulness you can’t help but smile.
At the top of the stairs, we got to poke our noses into two royal apartments full of museum displays and blessed with the same view as the courtyard. The real wonder, though, was the blue panelling with painted insets of classical scenes and birds and beasts of the rivers. Check out the fabulous beaver in the scene below; the animals would have been just about hunted to extinction in Europe at the time this was painted.
We descended the stairs to discover a modern treasure of the abbey awaiting us: the apricot brandy and liqueur produced here. The Wachau valley is famous for its apricots and the monks do them justice. The liqueur isn’t the sickly sweet stuff you think of when you hear “schnapps” but more like a dessert wine subtly flavoured with ripe apricot. The brandy is, naturally, fiercer, but still retains its fruity aromas and flavours. I regret not buying, but my available luggage space was mostly gone by this point.
We descended further to another surprise. Built into the foundations of this building is a restaurant with outdoor terraces hugging the hillside. Here, the view is even better than from the courtyard and the palace rooms, as it extends all the way to the Danube snaking through lush agricultural land. (There were a lot of apricot trees down there, somewhere.)
We walked through the now-empty restaurant, which only opens to the public at lunch, to a private dining room with an enormous window that took in that view. The food was beautifully presented, and tasty other than an over-cooked piece of chicken, the local wines were excellent and the service spectacular, but all of this faded in comparison to that view. Only one thing rose above it: Marillenknödel. This apricot dumpling was the single best dessert I had on the trip, and considering we spent most of our two weeks in Germany and Austria, that is saying a lot. I might not have come home with any alcohol, but I have the monks’ dumpling recipe.
After dinner, we climbed back up to the main courtyard, crossed it and entered the church as the low angle of the setting sun turned parts of it a colour you might just find on a blushing, ripe … apricot.
Inside, one of the monks waited to give us a traveller’s blessing. Maybe you need to be Catholic to really comprehend this, but between the full stomach, the setting sun, the kindness radiating from the priest and the embrace of that gorgeous architecture, it was as if my mother had popped down from heaven for a few minutes to wrap a warm blanket around me and hold be in her arms. Such peaceful contentment is a rare and wonderful thing, and not something you associate with sightseeing excursions. And that, even more than the aura of exclusivity, is why Göttweig made my list of best excursions this holiday.
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