A View from the East

 Vienna is a fascinating place. I'd never really thought about this city until I moved here, and if anyone had asked me where it was, I would've pointed roughly under Germany somewhere, but after moving here, I realised how wrong I was.

Despite its comparative wealth and Western credentials, one of the first things you notice is just how un-Western it feels in many ways. The German spoken here sounds nothing like the cosmopolitan, well spoken, clearly understandable German tones you'll hear in Germany (or indeed like polite English or French), but instead like a sort of lazy, operatic, half-singing, half-whining drone which is undecipherable to anyone but the most concentrated listener.

But this is not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is how I had now idea just how far East I was moving. This is not some city an hour from Switzerland, or a short train journey from the Austrian Alps where I'd skied as a child, but instead a city that lies east of Prague, that well known stalwart of cheap and cheerful beer and a favourite gateway into Eastern Europe. Even more, it lies further east than both Zagreb and Ljubljana, which are both in firm "where-the-hell-is-that" territory for most Brits. We're closer to Ukraine than we are to Switzerland which is pretty mind-blowing!

We are a 45minute drive from Bratislava of Hostel fame, and there are suburban commuter trains that stretch into Hungary.

What makes all this so fascinating is another thing I hadn't realised. That Austria used to be a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, an entity I know very little of still to this day, other than that it stretched all the way into modern day Ukraine, Serbia and Bosnia.

This is an entity that came face to face with the Ottoman empire, another entity I had no real understanding of. If you had asked me last year when the Ottoman empire was around, I would've suggested sometime around the time of Genghis Khan, but it was still around in the years following the 1st World War (as were the remnants of Austria-Hungary), which is mind-blowing (to me at least)

Vienna really was a place of historical significance, despite its decline into relative obscurity in the last century.

My historical knowledge starts to reach its limit at this point, but Austria-Hungary used to be quite an empire, and as such today it contains a lot more people from the Balkans than I have ever come across in my life. There are Serbian nightclubs, Balkan bakeries, and the sound of shrill Serbian women screeching into mobile phones is never far away.

 

Its sometimes hard to get to appreciate this history, being stuck infront of a computer all day, in an environment that has more in common with Silicon Valley than that of an Austro-Hungarian battlefield, but its fascinating nonetheless.

Anyway, in summary, its amazing just how far East this city lies, and just how central a role it played in some relatively recent history. Its fascinating to think that for many people here, their world view looks towards to old empire, rather than to what I consider "Europe" (i.e. France, Germany, Belgium etc).

France feels a million miles away compared to the closeness of the old empire!