Attack on the Emperor - Molker Bastei
The Molker Bastei is one of the last surviving ramparts of Vienna's demolished city walls, the same promenade where a Hungarian tailor drove a sharpened kitchen knife into young Emperor Franz Joseph's neck in 1853. Only a stiff uniform collar stood between the blade and the end of the Habsburg Empire.
Sobre este lugar
When Vienna's fortifications were torn down to build the Ringstrasse, this one stub of rampart, crowned by Beethoven's Pasqualatihaus, was spared, and with it the memory of the most dramatic moment of Franz Joseph's young reign. On 18 February 1853 the 22-year-old emperor was taking his customary stroll along the bastion promenade when the Hungarian tailor's apprentice Janos Libenyi lunged from behind and drove a kitchen knife, ground into a dagger, at the back of his neck. The stiff collar of the imperial uniform deflected the blade, an adjutant and a quick-fisted butcher overpowered the assassin, and eight days later Libenyi was hanged before a crowd of thousands. The grateful dynasty answered with the Votivkirche, whose 99-meter twin spires still rise just beyond the bastion. As if the place attracted darkness, the houses at its foot soon produced a horror of their own: the 1861 'Murder on the Moelkerbastei', in which a blacksmith strangled and dismembered his lover to clear the way to a richer bride, a case Vienna retold for decades in printed murder ballads.
Datos clave
- 1853 year — Hungarian tailor Janos Libenyi stabbed 22-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph in the neck during the monarch's customary walk on Vienna's bastion promenade.
- 99 meters — The height of the Votivkirche's twin spires, a church funded by empire-wide donations in thanksgiving for the emperor's survival.
- 1861 year — The 'Murder on the Moelkerbastei': blacksmith Raimund Lewisch strangled and dismembered his lover Anna Gangisch in a house just below the bastion.
📍 Mölker Bastei 3, 1010, Wien