Melk Abbey

Image: Wikimedia Commons

High on a rock above the Danube stands a long ochre and white abbey that looks less like a monastery than a ship of state under sail. Benedictines have prayed here since 1089, when Margrave Leopold II gave them his castle, and the monks turned it into one of Europe's great schools and libraries; their scriptorium copied manuscripts for centuries, and the abbey has never closed, surviving reformations, Napoleon's armies and two world wars. The building you see is the baroque masterpiece of Jakob Prandtauer, begun in 1702: an abbey church whose golden interior and high dome seem to lift the whole rock, a marble hall, and a library of tens of thousands of volumes under a ceiling fresco of wisdom. Umberto Eco borrowed the name of Melk for the young narrator of The Name of the Rose, an echo of its fame as a house of books. Still a working monastery and a school for hundreds of pupils, Melk keeps the Benedictine promise of stability, the same psalms in the same place, a thousand years running.