Vienna. A Walk Through the Labyrinth

For Daria Vilke, Vienna is the guardian of the past. The city lives with this past, it takes pride in it, it trades in it and makes a living in the present thanks to the past. It preserves and protects... ancient traditions and imperial secrets. This book is a tale about the Viennese dialect of Wienerisch and the Viennese Gspritzer, about what is hidden from the eyes of strangers, about the charming habits and dark secrets of the city.

Daria shows the modern reader this "other Vienna" through the eyes of an insider and a person who loves this strange city. She believes that Vienna always remains itself—a magnet that attracts all and everything, a crossroads of ideas, fates, and events. And a strange philosopher's stone, the mystery of which no one has yet fully unraveled.

"Sometimes Vienna resembles a room with soft walls. The city always smooths out everything excessive—it dissolves into copper curls, whimsical lines of moldings, and in the dashes of streams that have sunk underground or have been drained. Revolutions have torn other countries and cities apart brick by brick, while in Vienna they happened almost unnoticed. Perhaps that’s why nothing has ever worked out with large-scale city renovations here—neither adding countless straight-as-an-arrow avenues and vast squares into the city’s geography, nor completely destroying the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

  Vienna is like the imperial residence of Hofburg, around which it was built: the old layers on top of the new without a plan, one sticking to the other intuitively, the palaces are rather homely than imperial, and the pomp becomes beauty, having lost along the way all the excess characteristic of the Baroque architecture of Paris or Rome".