Austrian Hospice

About this audio guide

This guide to the Austrian Hospice in Jerusalem starts with an iron cot where Emperor Franz Joseph the First slept in 1869, the first European monarch to visit Jerusalem since the age of the Crusades, on a detour to open the Suez Canal. It follows the guesthouse built six years earlier so ordinary Austrians could rest along the Via Dolorosa, and the decades after that saw it pressed into other service, as a British-run orphanage, a Jordanian military hospital, and an Israeli facility. For most of the twentieth century, almost no pilgrim slept in these rooms at all.