Mayerling Castle

Mayerling Castle was a hunting lodge in Mayerling near Alland in Lower Austria, southwest of Vienna, until 1889. Today it houses the Mayerling Carmelite Monastery, a Teresian Carmelite monastery of Discalced Carmelites.

The property, which had been owned by Heiligenkreuz Abbey since 1550, was acquired by Crown Prince Rudolf in 1886 and converted into a hunting lodge.

In the night of January 30, 1889, the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, died here together with his mistress Mary Vetsera. The exact circumstances remain unclear to this day, as the Viennese court destroyed key documents and obliged witnesses to lifelong silence. According to the current state of research, Rudolf, plagued by depression, first shot his mistress, the 17-year-old Baroness Vetsera, before killing himself with a gunshot to the head.

Rudolf's father, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary, had the hunting lodge rebuilt in the same year by Heinrich Schemfil and Josef Schmalzhofer, whereby Rudolf's bedroom was demolished and a church was added to the building in its place. Its altar is located exactly where the bed stood in Rudolf's bedroom, on which Rudolf and Mary died. The castle was then converted into a monastery and handed over to the Carmelites.

Contrary to his express last will, Rudolf was not buried together with Mary Vetsera in the cemetery of the neighboring Heiligenkreuz Abbey, but was interred in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna, where he rests next to his parents Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth. Mary Vetsera was buried in Heiligenkreuz.