A New Year's Visit to Vienna

For better or worse, a New Year has commenced. Persons under the age of forty are still living on their interest, while persons over that age are consuming their capital. The former think they have something to celebrate because they are still in the black. The latter are in the red and, depending on their age, have little cause to celebrate because they can only look forward to impending bankruptcy. Time is a merciless taskmaster with a whip who does not give us a moment’s rest but constantly drives us forward. The sudden death of Bre Payton, a political journalist for The Federalist, from the flu at the age of twenty-six reminds us of Seneca’s saying, No man can be more sure of tomorrow than any other man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ORHVroiWHk

Julius Caesar decided to reform the calendar and enlisted Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer to do the job. Sosigenes advised Caesar to switch to the solar year and drop the lunar year that the Romans had been using. He calculated the solar year as 365.25 days, divided the year into 12 months and added a leap year every four years to make up a discrepancy.

A year is supposed to be the time it takes Earth to orbit the Sun.

The first New Year was celebrated on January 1, 45 B.C. However, due to a slight error in calculation of the solar year, an 11-minute a year error occurred because the solar yard is actually 365.242199 days.

Ten days had to be added to the calendar by the mid-16th century

The Catholic Church became aware of the problem, and in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII enlisted Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius to carry out the reform.

The result was the Gregorian calendar, which most of the world uses today. Some parts of the Orthodox Church and the Berbers still use the Julian calendar.

January is named after the Roman God Janus, who has two faces, one looking backward, another looking forward. July is named after Julius (Caesar), August after Emperor Augustus.

A day on Mars is only forty minutes longer than a day on Earth (time it takes a planet to make a complete rotation on its axis), but a Martian year is 687 Earth days. So a 50-year old woman on Earth would be only 25 on Mars. That sounds like an ideal way to shed years, doesn’t it?.

To bring in the New Year, we visit Vienna, which has been named the best city to live in for the ninth year in a row by the Mercer Quality of Life survey.

Vienna, the city of Mozart, Beethoven, and the Strauss family, is the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a ramshackle political entity that was composed of a dozen or so ethnic groups and was dismembered under the Versailles Treaty in 1919.

For alternative history buffs, there would have been no World War II if the Austro-Hungarian empire had not been dismembered because Hitler would have been unable to absorb it.

Vienna has so many famous monuments and museums that it is impossible to visit them all even on a longer visit. Most tourists take in Schönbrunn Palace, the Opera House, the Hofburg, St. Stephan’s Cathedral, the Prater with its giant Ferris wheel, Belvedere Palace, the Burggarten for idyllic walks, the Graben exclusive shopping center, and many other attractions too numerous to name.

There is one most interesting place that most visitors miss. Just five-minutes’ walk from the Meridien Hotel at Neuer Markt 1 is a small church on a street with restaurants and cafes, shops, and traffic. Someone walking down the street would never suspect that the unimposing church is the burial place of members of the Habsburg royal family. Attached to the church is a cloister of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, who care for the crypt. The order arose in 1520 when Matteo Sarafini di Bascio, a Franciscan, wished to return to the primitive way of life of penance and solitude as practiced by St. Francis of Assisi. The life of Capuchin friars is one of poverty, simplicity, and austerity. They are not allowed to even touch money. Among notable Capuchins one can mention Saint Pio the modern mystic and Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley.

The crypt is almost full, but there is still a place for the few remaining members of the royal family, who are in their eighties and nineties. The most recent notable buried in the crypt in 2011 was Prince Otto von Habsburg, son of Blessed Charles, the last Emperor of Austria. Otto, as the rightful heir to the throne, was nerve allowed to visit Austria because he never abdicated.

Most of the Habsburgs are buried here, with the exception of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie (both assassinated in June 1914) and Emperor Blessed Charles I, who never abdicated and is buried in his place of exile on the island of Madeira.

There are enough tragedies mad human interest stories for hundreds of novels. There is the tragic death of beloved Sissi, Franz Joseph’s wife, there is Rudolf, his son and heir to the throne, who with his mistress seventeen-year-old Baroness Mary Vetsera committed suicide at Mayerling, there is Franz Joseph’s brother Maximiian, who became emperor of Mexico and ended up before a firing squad, and so many more tragic stories.

Rebecca West in her epic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon summed up her view when she referred to the accession of Rudolf of Habsburg to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire in 1273 as an ‘unlucky’ day. She said that the family produced no genius and only two rulers of ability, Charles V and Maria Theresa, but countless dullards and not a few imbeciles and lunatics.

The great Austrian writer Robert Musil in his remarkable novel The Man without Qualities tooka contrary view when he referred to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as Kakania from the words kaiserlich-königlich (Imperial-Royal) and called it a state that has been misunderstood. The constitution was liberal, the pace of life not too rapid, the manners of the people easy-going, he wrote with nostalgia about this vanished land:”

An annual event is the New Year’s concert by the Vienna Philharmonic, which closes with Johann Strauss Senior’s Radetzky March, composed in honor of Joseph Radetzky (1766-1858), field marshal, military genius, and national hero, who created the strategy that defeated Nalpoeon and who at the age of 83 defeated the Italians and saved Europe from an international war and revolution.

Listen to this stirring march, clap along with the audience, and bring in the New Year.