Every great capital is 'from' an age, meaning not just the age of the majority of its public architecture and housing stock, but also the age of its great accomplishments on the world stage, which somehow, curiously, translates to its citizens' own idea of themselves. London is parked somewhere in Victoria's late reign, between Dickens and Disraeli, New York still exists in the Thirties and Forties, from, say Rodgers and Hart through to V-E Day, and Paris still taps the roots in its collective hivemind of the time of Stein, Pound, Picasso and Hemingway, the Moveable Feast of the Twenties.
Vienna – capital of the Habsburgs for seven hundred years -- is more traditional and is keyed to monarchs, specifically, from the Napoleonic Wars to the Kaiser Franz Josef, the early and mid-nineteenth. The evidence abounds around the Ringstrasse – in the Opera and its annual Ball, in Elizabeth's 'Sisi's' apartments in the Hofburg, in the still holy exhibition of the Habsburg Crown Jewels, in the Lippizanners, in the reverence and punctuality of the ritual of the cafes, the estimable Kaffeehäuser, Demel, Sacher, Hawelka, Diglas.
He Owns the Street: A Fiaker in his greatcoat and apron with his coach and pair behind St. Stephan's... [+]
A more modest but arguably more delightfully 'street' relic of the Habsburgs are the Fiakers, Viennese argot for the hundred-odd rigorously bowler-and-black-tie-clad coachmen and their impeccable hansom cabs. They drive pairs of excellently-kept draft horses who ply the Ring, the Castle, and the center's inner streets – a coach and pair are still, also, called droschkas here, in a nod to Vienna's Slavic and Magyar chunks of Empire, Bratislava and Budapest.
Often dismissed as too touristic, Viennese Fiakers are the real, rigorous, 19th-century deal – many of them working for family firms that stretch back to the old days. The concept of a hansom cab-for-hire has been been working Vienna since about 1700 – in the 1800s there were a thousand of them. The name Fiaker which can mean both the coach and the coachman, comes to Vienna via Paris' Rue de Saint Fiacre, where hansom cabbies gathered to feed and water their stock and to be called to jobs in the 1600s.
Blink Twice and It's 1862: two gentlemen of the Cathedral queue
In Vienna, these coachmen quite simply rule the streets – at once witty, arcane, jocular, and just the right amount hilariously angry – they are a comfort and always a delight. An hour's booking costs a hundred euros, or about a hundred and twenty bucks. You can take them anywhere, and for longer. If you remember Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire's nighttime dancing scene as they alight from a Central Park hansom cab in Vincente Minelli's The Band Wagon (1953), dial that back a hundred years and you pretty much have the most romantic thing you could possibly do in this imperial, yet daintily arcane, time-capsule of a town.
Exactly as in the old days, there are hansom cab stands around the center of town, notably, in Stephansplatz behind the cathedral, and at Heldenplatz, Michaelerplatz, Petersplatz and at the Burgtheater. In these places they water and feed their horses, tend to their coaches, smoke, joke with each other, parade for clients, haggle and generally add much comedy to the streetscape. These caring horsemen are also extremely tightly bound to one another. You won't be inviting them out to drinks. It's part and parcel of their lovely, unbeatably funny thorniness. In fact there'a a Viennese word for their sharp, sweet, and dour back-and-forth: raunzen, a sort of combination of to tease and to trounce.
Puttin' on The Strut: Sometimes, the only way to get a fare is to be The Man (Copyright: Guy Martin)
With that talent and with their own horsemanship, the Fiakers of Vienna will give you a real street-level view of the city, as well as a fine feel for what it was like for the Habsburgs, with their own coachmen, back in the day. Spend a couple of hours with the papers and coffee in Cafe Diglas, stroll down and buy a homburg from Nagy Hats in the Wollzeile, and hop a Fiaker for a long, leisurely tour back to your hotel.
You're in Habsburg time.
