À propos de ce lieu
Laid out around 1160 by Duke Otakar III as the city's central marketplace, the Hauptplatz has been the civic and commercial heart of Graz for more than eight centuries. Its trapezoidal expanse is closed off on the north-west by the monumental Rathaus, given its present late-historicist form between 1889 and 1893, and centred on the Erzherzog-Johann-Brunnen, a bronze fountain unveiled on 8 September 1878 whose four female figures personify the rivers Mur, Enns, Drau and Sann. For all its Renaissance and Baroque facades and its everyday bustle of market stalls and trams, the square carries a darker memory. In the tense weeks of early 1938 it filled again and again with National Socialist demonstrators, and on the night of 24 February a crowd of some twenty thousand pressed against the Rathaus, forcing the mayor to unfurl a swastika banner from the corner tower while Chancellor Schuschnigg's radio address blared across the square. After the Anschluss the square was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz, and it remained a parade ground for the regime that styled Graz the City of the People's Uprising until the war's end.
À retenir
- 1160 founded — The Hauptplatz was laid out around 1160 by Duke Otakar III as Graz's central marketplace.
- 20000 demonstrators — Roughly 20,000 National Socialists gathered before the Rathaus on 24 February 1938, forcing a swastika flag onto the building.
- 7 years renamed — From 1938 until 1945 the square was officially renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz.
📍 Hauptplatz, 8010, Graz