St. Stephen's Cathedral

This guide to St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna opens in April 1945, when looters ransacking shops nearby accidentally set the scaffolding wrapped around the north tower alight, as Soviet and German troops still fought across the Danube Canal below. Inside that tower hung the Pummerin, an eighteen-ton bell cast two centuries earlier from cannons seized from a defeated Ottoman army at the gates of Vienna. Listen for how the fire moved through the roof and choir stalls above you as you stand in the square.