Admont Abbey

Listen for a moment. Under your feet the floor is a pattern of diamonds in three colours, and the sound of each step travels a long way down the hall before it fades. The air is cool and dry. It smells of old paper and polished wood. Light comes in through tall windows on both sides and falls on white walls and gilded shelves. It feels less like a room of books and more like the inside of a lantern.

You are standing in the library of Admont Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in the Austrian state of Styria. The Benedictines are a Catholic order of monks who follow a rule of prayer and work written in the sixth century. Monks have lived on this site for more than nine hundred years. The abbey was founded in 1074 by Gebhard, the Archbishop of Salzburg. And here is a detail many visitors never learn — monks still live and pray here today.

The early abbey owed a great deal to a woman. Saint Hemma of Gurk was a wealthy noblewoman of the eleventh century who left vast estates to the Church. Part of that inheritance helped to fund the new monastery here in the valley of the Enns river. Over the centuries Admont became a centre of learning. Its monks copied manuscripts, ran schools, and gathered books. That long habit of collecting is the reason this hall exists at all.

The room around you was built in the late Baroque style. Baroque is the dramatic, light-filled art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made to impress and to move the viewer. The architect was Josef Hueber, and the hall was completed in 1776. Admont describes it as the largest monastic library hall in the world. Look down the full length of the room. It runs roughly seventy metres from end to end, divided into three sections under seven shallow domes.

Now lift your eyes to the ceiling. The frescoes were painted by Bartolomeo Altomonte, and he was around eighty years old when he did the work. Think about that for a moment — an old man on scaffolding, painting wet plaster high above the floor. The scenes follow a journey of the mind. They move through the arts and the sciences towards the central dome, where divine revelation crowns the whole design.

The colours were chosen with care. White and gold run through the whole hall. The white shelves and the pale walls reflect the daylight, so the room stays bright even on a grey Alpine afternoon. The idea was simple. Enlightenment, in the eyes of the builders, belonged together with faith. Knowledge and light were meant to fill the same space, and the architecture makes that point without a single word.

About seventy thousand volumes stand on these shelves. That is only part of the collection. The abbey holds many more books in other rooms, along with medieval manuscripts and early printed books. Some of the oldest manuscripts are far older than the hall itself. Monks wrote and copied them by hand long before printing reached Europe. The library you see is the visible tip of a much deeper archive.

Here is the second surprise. Some of the bookshelves are not bookshelves at all. Hidden doors are set into the walls of the hall, and they are covered with the painted spines of false books. When they are closed, they blend into the rows of real volumes. Staff could slip in and out without breaking the line of shelves. Walk slowly along the walls and see if you can spot where the real books end and the painted ones begin.

Now look for the sculptures. They are the work of Josef Stammel, a Baroque sculptor who worked for the abbey for many years. The most famous group shows the Four Last Things of Christian teaching — Death, the Last Judgement, Hell, and Heaven. The figure of Death is a skeleton, and many visitors pause in front of it longer than they expect. The carved wood is painted to look like bronze, so it seems far heavier than it is.

The library survived a disaster that the rest of the abbey did not. In 1865 a great fire swept through the monastery and destroyed much of it. The church burned, and so did large parts of the old buildings. The library hall was spared. When you walk outside later, you will see the results of the rebuilding, including the church with its two tall towers. It was rebuilt in the neo-Gothic style, a nineteenth-century revival of medieval pointed arches and soaring spires.

Admont is not only a library. The abbey also runs museums covering art, history, and natural history. The natural history collection includes a very large collection of insects gathered by one of the monks, a passionate entomologist — someone who studies insects. There is also contemporary art, which may feel unexpected inside a monastery this old. The mix is deliberate. The monks see old and new art, faith and science, as part of one long conversation.

Step outside and the setting comes into view. The abbey sits in a wide green valley, with the Enns river nearby and steep limestone mountains all around. To the west lies the Gesäuse, a national park of rugged peaks and deep gorges. The monastery has always worked this land. For centuries it managed forests and estates in the region, and that connection to the landscape is still part of its life today.

Before you leave the hall, stand still once more near the centre, under the middle dome. Look along the shelves to one end, then turn and look to the other. Notice how the light changes as a cloud passes outside. Listen to the quiet voices around you, and the soft creak of the floor. People have stood here and looked up in wonder for two and a half centuries. For a few minutes now, you are one of them.