VIENNA (dpa) – As fans of Orson Welles’ classic “The Third Man” will know, the way into the Viennese underworld leads through a door in a street advertising column.
Visitors can follow in Welles’ footsteps into the sewers of the Austrian capital, guided by the tourist company “Vienna Walks & Talks”.
Tour guide Kerstin Timmermann opened the slightly rusty door of the advertising column and led us down the steps into the city sewers. “This is the original one that Orson Welles went down in the film,” said the tour guide as she lit a few torch flames gave off a gloomy light.
But back then in 1948 the column stood on Platz am Hof in the city centre, not here on Beethovenplatz, near the city park. The filmmakers preferred the central backdrop.
Four round advertising pillars in Vienna offer access to the sewers. They are not the only way into the 7,000 kilometres of underground waterways – every drain cover offers access. But they are certainly the most comfortable way to enter the labyrinth of dark passageways. The eyes gradually get used to the darkness at you descend the 42 steps.
The torches hardly light up the ground. But Timmermann warned her guests what was awaiting them. “Careful!” she called, before anyone trod on a dead rat on the walkway. An estimated three million rats inhabit Vienna’s sewers – far out-numbering the human population.
But you do not see many rats on these Third Man tours. This was a relief to most participants, although it makes the experience feel less authentic.
The Third Man tours of Vienna’s sewers have been a popular part of the company’s programme for a few years. Many visitors have seen the film in which Orson Welles plays the drug pusher Harry Lime, and want to see where it was made. Many are disappointed when they find out many of the scenes were actually filmed in a studio in England.
“What is more, it is not Welles himself in many of the sequences,” Timmermann explained. “The superstar did not want to go down in to the stinking sewers, he used a Viennese master butcher as his double.”
Only on three days of the shoot, when his face was in the scenes, could the U.S. actor not avoid personally descending into the labyrinths – but only after the walls had been generously perfumed for him.
“In summer it really stinks,” said Timmermann, pulling a face, as the group climbed back to pavement level on Naschmarkt. In autumn and winter it is less pungent.
The sewers are the most spectacular part of the Viennese underworld, but they only a small part of it. Almost the whole city centre has a cellar network, some of them five or six storeys deep, and there are very many connecting doors. “In 1500 you could cross Vienna completely underground,” said Timmermann.
Some cellars were later converted into restaurants or dance clubs, and in World War II they served as air raid shelters. “When the house above them was destroyed, people went through the corridors to next door and went up that way,” she said.
The system was also used extensively during the black market years after 1945. Today most of the corridors have been closed off “but new underground paths are often discovered during road works,” she said.
Sometimes the diggers also come across skeletons. Before Emperor Joseph II (1765-1790) banned burials inside the city walks on hygienic grounds, many people were buried here – sometimes only a metre below the ground.
“Bones turn up every time the earth is moved,” said Father Stephan Sinai, one of the 26 Benedictine monks in the Schotten Monastery in the northwest of the inner city. Underneath the monastery’s church, monks are buried in three layers, he said. The crypt, which also contains a sarcophagus from previous centuries, is still used as a burial place for members of the monastery.
The imperial tombs in the Capucin vaults are more splendid. A total 146 Habsburgs were laid to rest here, the last of them Empress Zita in 1989, whose husband Karl I was forced into exile in 1918. Many flowers and wreaths adorn the tombs, especially those belonging to Emperor Franz Joseph I, his son Rudolf, and Empress Elizabeth (“Sisi”).
Yet despite all the bright flowers, the mood in these vaults is gloomy – like everywhere else in Vienna’s underworld.
“Vienna Walks & Talks” offers Third Man tours every Monday and Friday, starting at 16.00. The “Vienna’s Unknown Underworld” tours are on Wednesdays at 13.30. The tours cost 16 euros (14.40 U.S. dollars) and 12.35 euros (11 dollars) respectively, with concessions for students.
