Melk Abbey. Leaf Gold, Stucco and Marble

What you can see today is, of course, much younger. Baroque architect Jakob Prandtauer created the massive building complex during the first four decades of the 18th century. The southern wing with the marble hall alone is 240 metres (787 feet) long. Aside from hundreds of workers, artists from all over Austria and Italy contributed their skills and were inspired by the light and spectacular vista of the glowing sunrise over the Wachau Valley. Their abbey church is widely regarded as the most beautiful in the entire country. The ceiling frescoes inside are glowing as if they were lit from within.

The opulence that greets Melk’s visitors is almost theatrical. “The goal back then was to create a Gesamtkunstwerk,” says Father Ludwig, “as beautiful and grand as humanly possible.“ In the centre of the hall of mirrors, where stacked glass panels reflect the golden shimmer of the abbey's treasures, two modest wooden figures, small humans in rags, serve as a reminder that in the end, all the opulence of the Baroque just reflected the wealth of a select few.

Melk has always been a place where knowledge was collected and stored: The abbey's library comprises 100,000 books and is among the most famous in Europe. Only a small part of the collection is accessible to visitors, as valuable editions and manuscripts from the Middle Ages are housed in the cellar vaults of the library. The annals of Melk are also carefully stored away: the Abbey’s own records include regional nature phenomena, political developments and information on new abbots. Even Dschingis Khan made it into the annals, as his troops invaded today's Lower Austria in the middle of the 13th century.