The bastion that broke

This street is named after something that no longer exists. The Löbelbastei stood roughly where you're walking now, and it was the bastion where things nearly fell apart in September 1683.

 

Kara Mustafa, the Ottoman commander-in-chief, had concentrated his attack on this stretch. Between this bastion and the one by the castle lay the heaviest digging of the entire siege: trenches creeping closer metre by metre, mine chambers under the wall, blasts that knocked away a piece of the rampart each time.

 

In the first days of September it worked. A breach opened in the defences, the attackers stood in the rubble, and inside the city a few thousand exhausted men were still holding shut a gap that grew wider every night. Preparations for the final assault were in full swing when, on the twelfth of September, the relief army came down from the Kahlenberg.

 

None of it survives. The Volksgarten park next door sits on the ground where the trenches ran, and the only reminder of the bastion is the name of this street.

 

A few hundred metres further on lies the square where the emperor set out when all of this was still only beginning.