Melk

Melk is first mentioned as Medilica in 831, in a donation by Louis the German; the name comes from a Slavic word for border. In 976 the area was given to Leopold I, the first Babenberg margrave, as a buffer between the Magyars to the east and Bavaria to the west, and the Babenbergs had a castle on the rocky bluff above the river. In 1089 Leopold II gave the site to Benedictine monks from Lambach, and their abbey became the town's reason for being. A monastic school was founded in the 12th century, and the library became known for its manuscripts.

The town below received market rights in 1227. It lived from the river, which could also destroy it: in 1501 the Danube rose 15.8 metres above its usual level, a mark still recorded on the Schiffsmeisterhaus. The town hall dates from 1575. Between 1702 and 1736 the abbey was rebuilt to designs by Jakob Prandtauer as one of the great Baroque monasteries of Europe. It survived the Napoleonic Wars, and Melk became a municipality in 1898.

After the Anschluss of 1938 the abbey school and much of the abbey were confiscated. In 1944 a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp was set up in the town's barracks; more than 14,000 prisoners passed through it, and about 5,000 died digging tunnels for an underground factory. The school returned to the monks after the war. A fire damaged the abbey in 1974, and in December 2000 the Wachau, from Melk to Krems, was listed as a World Heritage cultural landscape. The town was flooded again in 2002 and 2013.

Life in Melk still turns around the abbey. It is a working Benedictine house, the burial place of St. Coloman and of several members of the Babenberg family, and its school, the Stiftsgymnasium, teaches nearly 900 boys and girls. The library's medieval manuscripts made the name of Melk known far beyond Austria, and Umberto Eco paid tribute to it in The Name of the Rose, whose William of Baskerville is accompanied by his assistant Adso of Melk. St. Coloman also stands on the market fountain in the Rathausplatz, a gift from the abbey to the town.

The town keeps its own small calendar. In July and August the Melker Sommerspiele stage theatre in the Donauarena, and in the third week of July the two-day Höfefest fills the old town. A tablet near the Rathausplatz commemorates the composer Anton Bruckner, and in 1950 Melk hosted Austria's first official women's chess championship. The painted fronts of the houses in the Sterngasse still show the trades once carried on inside them.

Melk shares the customs of the Wachau around it: wine taverns that open for a few weeks at a time, the apricot harvest, and a Catholic calendar of feast days. Visitors are expected to be quiet and decently dressed in the abbey church.

Melk had about 5,300 inhabitants in 2012, a small town between the Melk and Pielach rivers on a side arm of the Danube. It is the centre of the surrounding district, with schools, offices and shops serving the villages around it, and an army barracks on the site of the former concentration camp. Tourism is the most visible part of the economy: coaches, trains and river boats bring day visitors to the abbey, and in summer cyclists on the Danube path fill the squares.

Daily life follows the season. From spring to autumn the landing stages, cafés and squares are busy, and the town quietens again in the evening once the day visitors have left; in winter it belongs to its residents. The abbey school brings hundreds of pupils into the centre each weekday. The A1 motorway and the main western railway make Vienna an hour away, and some residents commute.

The Danube is both the town's living and its risk. Floods reached Melk in 2002 and 2013, and the town council elected in 2025 has an ÖVP majority.

Melk eats as the rest of Lower Austria does, with Wiener Schnitzel, goulash, dumplings and roast pork with sauerkraut on tavern menus, and Austrian pastries such as apple strudel and Kaiserschmarrn, a shredded, lightly sweetened pancake, in the cafés around the squares.

What sets the area apart is the Wachau just downstream. Its apricots, Marillen, are also made into speciality spirits, and the terraced vineyards along the river grow Riesling and Grüner Veltliner. Wachau wines are graded by ripeness as Steinfeder, Federspiel and Smaragd, the last named after the green lizard that lives on the vineyard walls.

The Heuriger, the grower's own tavern, is the local way to drink them. Taverns in the wine villages open for a few weeks at a time, serving their own wine with simple food, and at the start of autumn Sturm, a partially fermented young wine. Along the river the cycle path and the boat landings are lined with places to stop for wine and food in season.