MAYERLING, HEILIGENKREUZ, & SEEGROTTE

Since Monday was a holiday we took a bus tour south from Vienna to a small town called Bad.

First stop was Mayerling, home of Emperor Franz Joseph and his wife in the 1800s. They had one son (Rudolf) who would have succeeded his father as emperor had he not died in 1889. The truth has never been discovered as to the cause of death. Rudolf married Stephanie in 1881 at the age of 23, but quickly found himself in a loveless marriage. Rudolf's mistress, Mary, 17 yrs. old, died with him. One rumor was that he shot Mary then committed suicide, but there was no evidence of a gunshot wound to Mary. So, the truth may never be known.

Mayerling

Mary

Next we visited Heiligenkreuz (Holy Cross), the oldest continuously occupied cisterciana monastery in the world. It has existed without interruption since 1133. Currently it houses 70 monks who daily occupy the building to recite liturgy and gregorian chants in Latin. Heiligenkreuze combines both Romanesque and Gothic architecture. It was beautiful, but very cold and damp. Prayers are offered daily for the dead in a room with skeleton statues. It is supposedly very simple compared to abbys built later. We will have to see others to have something to compare it to, but it looked very ornate to me.

Last stop was an old gypsum mine called Seegrotte in the village of Hinterbühl.

In 1912 a blasting operation let loose millions of gallons of water which flooded the lower caves of the mine, creating the largest underground lake in Europe. During the 1930s a team of cave experts found the lake. During WW II Germans requisitioned the mine and pumped out all the water. They set up an underground factory to produce the fuselage of the world's first jet plane, the HE 162. Over 2000 prisoners of war worked in the cold and damp caves to produce these airplanes.
We walked down a very long path in the cave to arrive at the lake where we took a boat ride. It maintains a constant temperature of 8 celsius in the cave and the water is only a meter and 20 cm deep.

On the way back we were driven by an old castle, Lichtenstein. It looked amazing from the outside and I can't wait to be able to go in it. I think we will wait for grandkids to visit this site.