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The 17 meter long whale sculpture in Vienna's Museum Quarter by Mathias Gmachl, "Echoes - a voice from uncharted waters", aims to draw attention to the ocean habitat visually and acoustically. The work of art will come from Austria to Switzerland then to Canada. It is also scheduled to tour around the globe in the next few years; The sculpture therefore represents an important contribution to the UN Decade of Ocean Sciences, which began on January 1st.
Whales have been “at home” in public spaces in Vienna for many centuries. First of all, the Walfischgasse in the first district is reminiscent of the giant marine mammals. In 1700 there was the “bey den Wallfisch” inn at number 17 on Krugerstrasse, from which the street name that was later given was derived. But that wasn't the only "Walfischhaus" in Vienna. Research in the Wiener Zeitung, which was called the Wienerisches Diarium until 1779, brings to light, among other things, the Schilling house "beym Walfisch near Mariahilf" (probably: Kellermanngasse 5, Wien-Neubau), then the house "beym Walfisch / near St. Ulrich", then in 1725 a house "beym golden Walfisch in Liechtenthal". In 1800 a house called "zum Walfisch" appeared in the inner city "Am Graben", where writing chalk and Viennese white [slim chalk] were for sale.
On July 7, 1804, a "Walfischgasse" was mentioned for the first time in the Wiener Zeitung, before one read about a "Wallfisch-Apotheke" in Josefstadt (8th district) in 1829.
The sensation of 1838: Vienna's first whale skeleton
At that time, whales were only known from the Old Testament tradition - keyword Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale -, but in the spring of 1838 there was a real whale skeleton on display at the gates of Vienna - "next to the red tower gate"; that would probably correspond to Schwedenplatz today. It was advertised in the media in February 1838 as a "very strange whale skeleton" and was therefore the attraction in Vienna. It could be visited from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., there were tickets for ten, 20 and 30 cruisers; Children under ten years old paid half. The animal measured 95 feet (around 29 meters) and could accommodate 24 people inside. Before the skeleton came to Vienna, the maritime sensation had already stopped off in London, Paris, Brussels, Frankfurt and Stuttgart.
An online search in the holdings of the Vienna Museum leads to a 31.5 by 49.3 centimeter lithograph: "Scarf of a whale, which was seen in front of the Burgtor [Vienna-Innere Stadt] in 1828." This depiction shows people inside the whale skeleton, much as mentioned above. But this year does not correspond to the year 1838 mentioned above; there are ten years in between. The drawing may be labeled and dated incorrectly - this question cannot be answered conclusively.
The Prater whale from 1889
On April 30, 1889, a huge whale arrived from Berlin on the Northern Railway, not a skeleton, of course, but a complete one, which increasingly posed a challenge to the sense of smell. The animal weighed 30 tons and was around 19 meters long, significantly smaller than the skeleton from 1838. It could be seen on the fireworks meadow in the Prater, not far from the Nordbahnhof. As soon as the animal arrived, it became the target of the local press. "A visit to a whale has one unpleasant thing in its wake: the smell that the animal, which has of course been prepared and disinfected in the most appropriate manner, nevertheless exudes. There is nothing harmful to health in this smell, but it touches the nose in such a way that most visitors hastily press the handkerchief to their olfactory organ," writes the Neue Wiener Tagblatt on May 10, 1889 under the title The newest train piece in the Prater.
Among the whale-watching visitors was Education Minister Paul Gautsch (1851–1918), who apparently wanted to see whether the animal was suitable for teaching, especially since schools were granted reduced admission. The clergy also came in the person of Cardinal Cölestin Ganglbauer (1817-1889) and the high nobility with Archduke Eugen (1863-1954), who paid the animal a visit on May 25th. In the second half of June, the "whale" spectacle was over; it was cut up on the night of June 21st on the orders of the magistrate and then disposed of professionally.
Remains of this animal came to the Natural History Museum, where Frank Zachos, curator of the mammal collection, has information on inventory number 33021. Accordingly, the animal was a fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus), which was found dead on December 30, 1888 in Barritskov in the Vejle Fjord on the east coast of Denmark. On January 5, 1889 it was examined and described zoologically and then came to Vienna via Berlin. It was displayed here until June 20, 1889, then skeletonized before it went to the museum. Today the lower jaw bones of the Danish-German Praterwal can be seen vertically on the door, between rooms XXXIV and XXXV on the 1st floor.
The “Walfischwirte” in the Prater
A “Wallfisch” host appeared for the first time in the Prater in 1782. A good hundred years later, the restaurant “Zum Walfisch” in the Prater was owned by the Pilz family. The resourceful innkeepers gave their restaurant a befitting entrance and mounted the lower jaw and rib of a sperm whale killed in the Bering Sea in 1895 at the entrance. It was a welcome eye-catcher that didn't cost anything to look at. It was obvious in the truest sense of the word that Mr. and Mrs. Pilz named their 600-meter-long cave railway, the first electrically operated railway of its kind in Europe, right next door, "Zum Walfisch", which they opened in 1898. In 1945, when the Prater was in ruins, the Walfisch Restaurant and the Grottenbahn fell victim to the flames. A piece of the whale's jaw from the original animal facade decoration can still be seen today in the Prater Museum. When the restaurant with the same name was rebuilt after the end of the Second World War as part of the reconstruction of the Prater, there was no corresponding landmark. There is a note that can also be interpreted as a cry for help for a new whale landmark, keyword crowdfunding: "Whale fish restorer, Vienna, II., Prater, sole owner from 1928 to 1938, is looking for donors. To the publisher under 'NO 2988'" (Neues Österreich, June 5, 1949). It is no longer possible to reconstruct when the impressive green tin whale, which is still vividly remembered by many, was mounted on the roof.
When the restaurant was demolished, the beautiful whale entrée was also over. But fortunately Güner Ayaz, managing director of the demolition company, recognized the cultural value of Wales; He had the Praterwal brought to his company premises and thereby saved it from the scrap press. In autumn 2016 he donated the animal Prater landmark to the Vienna Museum, where it was professionally restored and will therefore continue to be preserved.
If you want to see a really big whale, go to the Danube Canal. There is a huge and very beautiful whale graffiti under the Peace Bridge on the right bank (9th district).
A look back into the history of the earth
If you turn back the wheel of time around 14 million years, whales also swam in the sea of the Vienna Basin. The Vienna Basin was part of a vast subtropical sea that reached far into Inner Asia and was connected to the then young Mediterranean Sea via sea routes. The fauna of this sea is reminiscent of that of today's Red Sea. While thousands of dolphin remains were discovered in Vienna, only individual bones of an undetermined baleen whale came from Mauer in Vienna-Liesing.
In 1899 a whale was found in Johann Prost's brickworks (Borbolya municipality), today's Walbersdorf (Burgenland), then in Sopron (Ödenburg) county. In the wall of the brick pit there were several bones lined up in a row in gray clay. They turned out to be the remains of a spine. Retrieving the bones was anything but easy. In a report about the whale skeleton, Ottokar Kadić (1876–1957) wrote in 1907, "... that His Apostolic Majesty the Hungarian King, when he honored the Royal Hungarian Geological Institute with His highest visit on May 29, 1900, also viewed with great interest the remains of our balaenopterid, which was then still embedded in paraffin..." The Hungarian king in question was the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. Kadić recognized the fossil as a baleen whale and in 1904 gave it its scientific name: Mesocetus hungaricus - the "Hungarian middle whale". In fact, the size of the animal was rather "medium" at 6.5 meters long, but the "meso" in the name referred to the evolutionary stage and not the size.
In the 1930s, individual vertebrae from whales from the Walbersdorfer Ziegelei came to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. It is by no means impossible that whale remains can be found in the city of Vienna, provided one digs in the Tegel, which was deposited 14 million years ago.
The last large whale skeleton was recovered by fossil collector Gerhard Wanzenböck in Stotzing am Leithagebirge (Burgenland) in 1996. (Thomas Hofmann, Mathias Harzhauser, May 28, 2021)