Four Squares, One Market Since 1722: A Vienna Christmas Market Walking Tour

You're standing on the Rathausplatz, near the tall spruce at the head of Vienna's best-known Christmas market. Behind the tree rises the neo-Gothic City Hall, the Rathaus, with its central tower and a copper knight, the Rathausmann, at the very top. The stalls of the Wiener Christkindlmarkt run from here towards the Ring. This season's tree is a 31-metre spruce from Damüls in the Bregenzerwald, in Vorarlberg. It is more than 200 years old, grew on a former alpine pasture at 1,350 metres, and carries about 1,000 red and gold baubles and 2,000 lights. A tree has stood in front of the Rathaus every Advent since 1959, given in turn by one of the Austrian provinces or by South Tyrol. The one gap was 1986, when the custom was paused because of concern about dying forests. The market itself came here in 1975. It was meant as a stopgap while a car park was built at its previous site, in front of today's MuseumsQuartier, and it stayed. This year it has 97 stalls, 22 of them for food and drink, and it runs until 26 December 2026, daily from 10 am to 10 pm, closing at 6.30 pm on Christmas Eve. Friedrich Schmidt built the Rathaus between 1872 and 1883. Emperor Franz Joseph did not want any of its towers to be taller than the 99-metre towers of the nearby Votivkirche, so Schmidt planned the main tower at 98 metres, and the Rathausmann on top took it over the limit. On the four Advent weekends, choirs from Austria and abroad sing in the great hall upstairs. From 27 November to 23 December, brass players also perform from the roof of the large nativity scene beside the tree, from 7 to 7.30 and from 8 to 8.30 in the evening. Now turn so that the Rathaus is on your left, and walk into the park to the tree hung with red hearts, about 120 metres away.

You're in the northern half of the Rathauspark, between strings of lights in the trees. Near you is the Herzerlbaum, the heart tree, hung with about 200 glowing hearts. On the other side of the central avenue stands a tower 13 metres high. Every half hour from dusk until 9 pm, a large lit heart leaves that tower and travels about 75 metres along a rope across the Rathausplatz, lighting up the tree as it arrives. Around you is the market's Christmas world for children, 17 stations with signs in German, English and Braille. Two of them stand for customs worth knowing. One is the Advent wreath. Its ancestor was a cartwheel. In 1839, at the Rauhes Haus in Hamburg, Johann Hinrich Wichern, the founder of the Protestant Diakonie, wanted to shorten the wait for Christmas for children from the poorest families. He fixed twenty small red candles and four large ones to a cartwheel and lit one more every day. The wreath with four candles has been usual in Vienna since the 1920s, and Advent wreaths were first blessed in church in 1948. In 2026, Advent begins on Sunday 29 November. The other is the nativity scene, the Krippe. Nativity scenes came to Austria from Italy in the sixteenth century, and for centuries the Krippe was the main sign of Christmas in Vienna, until the lit tree pushed it aside in the nineteenth century. Along the paths of this park, the market shows nativity scenes made by the Krippenverein Wien, whose members have built up to seventy scenes a year since 2001. The southern half of the park, across the central avenue, is given over to the Eistraum, an ice rink of more than 3,000 square metres with 300 metres of ice paths between the trees. It is ticketed, skates can be hired, and it stays open until 6 January 2027. Now walk back towards the Ring, the wide road with the trams, and stop at the end of the central avenue, facing the theatre across the road. That is about 170 metres.

You're at the Ring end of the Rathausplatz, near the market's entrance arch, looking across the road and the tram tracks at the Burgtheater. Turn round and the City Hall closes the other end of the same line, so that the Christmas market stands between the two buildings. The Burgtheater opened here on 14 October 1888. Gottfried Semper and Carl von Hasenauer designed it, and building work began on 16 December 1874. Until then the company had played in an older house beside the Hofburg, on Michaelerplatz, which was pulled down to make way for a new wing of the palace. The new theatre had electric light from the start. Its two grand staircases, in the side wings, have ceiling paintings by Gustav Klimt, his brother Ernst and their partner Franz Matsch, made between 1886 and 1888. They tell the history of theatre, from the theatre of Dionysus in Athens to Molière's stage in Paris, and Gustav Klimt painted Shakespeare's Globe in London. Because the acoustics were poor, in 1897 the auditorium was rebuilt from a lyre shape into a horseshoe. The auditorium burned on 12 April 1945, at the end of the Second World War. The staircases survived, and the rebuilt theatre reopened on 14 October 1955, 67 years to the day after the first opening. The theatre also has a small part in the story of Vienna's Christmas tree. In 1821 Heinrich Anschütz, an actor of the Burgtheater, planned a Christmas with a lit tree for his family. When he went shopping for it, people still did not understand what he wanted. At that time Viennese children usually received their presents from Saint Nicholas in early December. Candle-lit trees had reached Vienna only a few years before, in the houses of a few wealthy families and then at court. Cross the Ring at the lights, walk along the left-hand side of the theatre, and keep heading north-east through the side streets to Teinfaltstraße, which brings you out onto the Freyung. It is about 500 metres.

You're on the Freyung, among the stalls of the Altwiener Christkindlmarkt, the Old Viennese Christmas Market. Look for the plain house with even rows of windows at number 7, next to the Schottenkirche. Its nickname is the Schubladkastenhaus, the chest-of-drawers house, because people thought its identical storeys looked like a chest of drawers when it went up in 1773 and 1774. This square has a long Christmas history. A Nikolo, Christmas and crib market is first mentioned here in 1722, with 108 stalls. A regular market used the square at the same time, and after quarrels between the two sets of stallholders, the Christmas market was moved to Am Hof in 1842. The market you are standing in is younger. It began in 1987 on Michaelerplatz and has been held here, in front of the chest-of-drawers house, since 1989. The city counts this as its 39th season. It has 57 stalls, 16 of them for food and drink, and it is open every day until 23 December 2026, from 10 am to 9 pm. On most afternoons there is live music on the stage at 4.30. This is a good place for a word about Punsch. A German encyclopedia of 1735 gave its basic ingredients as brandy, water, sugar, bitter-orange juice and nutmeg. In the early nineteenth century hot punch was still rare in Vienna, and newspapers treated it as a privilege of the rich English nobility. Mozart had first come across it on his journey to England in 1764. By the second half of the century it was a popular winter drink, with recipes shared in household magazines. Today's Viennese favourites are berry punch, made with mixed berries, red wine and fruit tea, and orange punch, with black tea, rum and freshly squeezed oranges. Kinderpunsch, for children, is warm spiced fruit juice sweetened with honey or sugar. When you're ready, leave the square at its south-east corner and follow the short street called the Heidenschuss up to Am Hof, about 260 metres.

You're on Am Hof, a wide square with the stalls of the Am Hof Christmas market set out around the column of the Virgin Mary in the middle. This is the square where Vienna's Christmas market spent most of the nineteenth century. The market moved here from the Freyung on trial in 1842, and for good in 1843. From then on, 132 crib-market stalls went up every year on 5 December, the eve of Saint Nicholas, and stayed until New Year. A report from 1851 says that before Christmas the square looked like a forest, because so many trees were for sale. In 1872 the city council abolished Vienna's old annual fairs, which it felt had no place in a modern city. The one exception was the Christmas market. In 1903 its 128 stalls were rebuilt and given electric light for the first time. In 1918 the market moved to Stephansplatz, where this walk ends. Opening on 5 December tied the market to the Nikolo, as the Viennese call Saint Nicholas. On the 5th and 6th he appears with his companion the Krampus, a hairy, horned figure with goat's feet, whose name probably comes from an old German word for a claw. For a long time the Nikolo brought Viennese children their presents. The writer Karoline Pichler noted in 1817 that, by old Austrian custom, presents came on Saint Nicholas's day. Only in the 1830s, when the lit tree replaced the crib as the sign of Christmas, did the Christkind, the Christ Child, become the bringer of gifts on Christmas Eve. Today's market has 76 stalls and is open until 23 December 2026. It opens at 11 am from Monday to Thursday and at 10 am from Friday to Sunday and on 8 December. The stalls close at 9 pm, the food and drink stalls at 10. Leave the square at its southern corner by the narrow Irisgasse, turn left into Naglergasse and follow it to the Graben. There, turn left and almost at once left again into the short Jungferngasse, which leads to St. Peter's Church. It is about 320 metres.

You're on Petersplatz, in front of St. Peter's Church, the Peterskirche. Its curved front, with a tower on each side and a great dome behind, is squeezed in among the houses just off the Graben. Under the whole church lies a crypt, which fills with nativity scenes every Advent. A nativity exhibition has been held down there every Advent since 1958. It is organised by the Krippenfreunde Wien-Niederösterreich, a society of nativity-scene makers. The 67th Krippenschau runs from 22 November to 15 December 2026, every day from 10 am to 6 pm. This year it features nativity scenes from Upper Austria, by crib makers from Linz and the Mühlviertel, and there is a small Advent market with nativity scenes for sale. Entry costs a few euros, cash only, and the society's members and helpers set up the whole exhibition as volunteers. The crypt also holds the oldest piece of the church, an early Romanesque stone lion from the doorway of an earlier church on this site. A legend credits Charlemagne with founding St. Peter's, but there is no evidence for it, and a marble relief of 1906 on the east wall of the church shows the story. The old church and its graveyard were pulled down in 1701, on the initiative of Emperor Leopold I. The baroque church you see was blessed in 1708, with the emperor and empress present, and finished in 1733. Gabriele Montani drew the plans, and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt may have revised them. St. Peter's also keeps the church side of Advent. On the first weekend of Advent, at the services on the evening of Saturday 28 November and on Sunday 29 November 2026, Advent wreaths are blessed. On the Wednesdays of 2, 9 and 16 December there is a Rorate Mass, the early-morning Mass of Advent, at 6.30 am. Walk back through Jungferngasse to the Graben and turn left. Go past the tall plague column and stop by the fountain beyond it, about 160 metres from here.

You're on the Graben, by the fountain east of the plague column. If it is dark, look up. Huge chandeliers of light hang over the middle of the street, with curtains of lights at the sides, and the shopkeepers like to say that the Graben turns into an open-air ballroom. Chandelier-shaped lights were first hung here in the winter of 2005, paid for by the street's shopkeepers' association. In 2023 the original chandeliers, by then 19 years old, were replaced with new ones that look almost the same. Each is six metres tall, and together they have 254,000 LED lights. The Graben and the space in front of St. Stephen's had a Christmas market long before the Freyung. Records from the year 1600 show wooden huts on the Graben and on the Brandstätte, beside St. Stephen's, being put up on 16 and 17 December and taken down on 9 January. This was the Thomasmarkt, and its stalls belonged to bakers, gingerbread makers and confectioners. It stood here every Christmas until 1761, when it was closed. Somewhere on today's walk you have probably smelled roasting chestnuts, Maroni, as Vienna calls them. The chestnut sellers have a long history here. According to the city's history, people from the Gottschee region, in today's Slovenia, became travelling traders in southern fruit, chestnuts among them, and in the mid-eighteenth century Empress Maria Theresa formally allowed them to sell chestnuts from their home region. With portable iron stoves fired with charcoal, they became familiar figures on Vienna's streets. In baroque Vienna many of the sellers were women, the Kästenweiber, and an engraving of 1775 shows one sitting at a box with her chestnuts, a wood-fired stove beside her. Today's Maronibrater roast potatoes as well as chestnuts, and they appear only in winter. Carry on east along the Graben to where it opens onto Stephansplatz, and stop among the market stalls by the north-west corner of the cathedral, about 190 metres away.

You're on Stephansplatz, among the stalls of the Christmas market at the foot of St. Stephen's Cathedral, with the steep cathedral roof rising above the huts. This market has 44 stalls, ten of them for food and drink. It runs until 26 December 2026, daily from 11 am to 9 pm, until 4 pm on Christmas Eve, and until 7 pm on 25 and 26 December. The old Christmas market came here from Am Hof in 1918. It moved several more times between the wars, and from 1924 to 1928 its huts stood around the cathedral, as these do now. Long before that, until the end of the eighteenth century, this square was a graveyard. Burials stopped in 1732, and the graves were cleared in 1783. St. Stephen's has its own place in Vienna's Advent customs. From the late seventeenth century there is a record of a Saint Nicholas in costume, booked and paid for through the parish of St. Stephen, who called at the house of the noble Harrach family. He gave a sermon and then handed out presents, while the parents and relatives watched. Before the tree and the giving of presents took over Christmas Eve, the high point of Christmas in Vienna was the Christmette, the Midnight Mass. Writers of the age of Emperor Joseph II attacked it, and attempts to abolish it or move it to the early morning of 25 December failed. It is still celebrated in Vienna's churches today. This is the end of our walk. We've come about 1.7 kilometres from the Christmas tree on the Rathausplatz. The U1 and U3 both stop at Stephansplatz. If you'd like more markets, the lanes of the Spittelberg, near U2 and U3 Volkstheater, hold 122 stalls until 23 December, from 2 pm on weekdays and from 11 am at weekends. The market in the courtyard of Schönbrunn Palace, by U4 Schönbrunn, stays open until 6 January 2027. Thank you for walking with me.