Minoritenkloster Wien

The Minoritenkloster stands in Vienna’s Alservorstadt, near the boundary between the Josefstadt and Alsergrund districts. It belongs to the Minorites, a Franciscan order founded in 1209 by St Francis of Assisi. The building is joined to the Alserkirche, and its central library holds the archives of the Austrian Minorite province. The monastery’s history reaches back to 1224, when Duke Leopold VI invited the order to Vienna. After the order moved to Alservorstadt in 1784, the site became home to the k.k. Civil-Mädchen-Pensionat. The parish, which cares for the Alsergrund district, keeps Europe’s largest register of births, marriages and deaths because of the many hospitals and former poorhouses in the area. Visitors enter the cloister and see about 4 300 votive tablets lining its walls. Two memorial plaques remember victims of the Nazi era, including Minorite cleric Peter Blandénier and thirteen others. At the cloister’s south side stands a niche with a memorial to Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe, murdered in Auschwitz. Beyond the cloister lies the Antoniuskapelle, whose altar painting dates from the time of Emperor Ferdinand II and shows St Anthony holding a lily and a book instead of the usual Christ Child.