Melk Abbey
The Benedictine abbey on a rock above the Danube is one of the most dramatic buildings of the Central European Baroque. The church, with its yellow-orange façade and copper dome, is framed by the monastic buildings, and the library holds tens of thousands of books beneath painted ceilings.
Benedictines have been at Melk since 1089. In 1702 Abbot Berthold Dietmayr commissioned the master builder Jakob Prandtauer to rebuild the abbey in the Baroque spirit, and the work went on for more than thirty years. Prandtauer made use of the rock: the church stands in the middle, and the two wings to the west close around a terrace that opens towards the Danube.
The Baroque in Austria and southern Germany is Catholic and monastic. After the victory over the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683 and the Counter-Reformation, abbeys and pilgrimage churches were built on a scale and with a splendour meant to display the power of the Church and the emperor. Melk is one of the clearest examples, and the abbey and the Wachau valley are a World Heritage Site. Umberto Eco made one of the main characters in The Name of the Rose, Adso, come from here.