Mondsee Abbey

Where it sits. Mondsee Abbey stands in the middle of the small market town of the same name, at the northern tip of the Mondsee lake in the Salzkammergut, about twenty-eight kilometres east of Salzburg. The lake is a long crescent — hence the name, "moon lake" — running south-west between wooded ridges toward the Drachenwand, a pale limestone cliff that drops almost vertically into the water on the western shore. The abbey church's twin yellow towers close the north end of the Marktplatz and are visible from the lakeshore promenade a few hundred metres away. Mondsee is the warmest of the Salzkammergut lakes, reaching the mid-twenties Celsius in high summer, which is why a monastic town of two and a half thousand people fills with swimmers every July.

The story behind it. The Benedictine monastery was founded in 748 by Odilo, Duke of Bavaria, which makes it one of the oldest religious houses in what is now Upper Austria. Its scriptorium produced the Mondsee Fragments, an Old High German translation of the Gospel of Matthew and other texts written around the year 800 — among the earliest surviving prose in the German language, and the reason the abbey matters to philologists as much as to pilgrims. The house passed to the bishops of Regensburg, regained independence, was sacked, rebuilt, and finally dissolved in 1791 by Emperor Leopold II. The buildings went to the Habsburg-era nobility; the church became the parish church of Mondsee and has served as one ever since. Pope Benedict XVI raised it to the rank of minor basilica in 2005, giving it the formal name Basilika St. Michael.

The building. The church is a late Gothic hall church, built between about 1470 and 1487, with a nave of unusual length and height for a country parish — roughly seventy metres long, with slender piers and a net vault. That length is the whole point of what happened here in 1964. The exterior was given its present face in the 1730s: a broad, flat, butter-yellow west front with two towers, restrained rather than exuberant, so that the shock is entirely interior. Inside stand black-and-gold altars carved by Meinrad Guggenbichler, the Swiss-born sculptor who worked at Mondsee from 1679 until his death in 1723 and whose figures — twisting, sharply lit, with drapery that looks blown by wind — are the finest baroque woodwork in the region. The Corpus Christi altar and the side chapels are his.

On screen. The wedding of Maria and Georg von Trapp in The Sound of Music (1965) was filmed in this church. Robert Wise's production needed a nave long enough to sustain the slow processional shot that carries Maria the full length of the aisle while the nuns sing "Maria" in the gallery, and no church in Salzburg itself offered both the length and the working conditions. So the crew drove east to Mondsee in spring 1964 and shot the sequence over several days, using the real interior with additional lighting rigged into the vault. The exterior establishing shot of the yellow twin towers is also Mondsee. The historical wedding was elsewhere: Maria Kutschera married Georg von Trapp on 26 November 1927 in the church of Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg, where she had been a novice — a small ceremony in a Romanesque nave, nothing like the film's. Mondsee has traded on the confusion ever since, and the church hosts a steady stream of couples who marry here specifically because of the film.

What you actually see today. Entry to the church is free and it functions as an ordinary parish, so services take precedence over sightseeing. The former monastery buildings around the cloister now house the Mondseer Rauchhaus open-air museum and a local history museum covering the Mondsee lake-dwelling culture, a Neolithic pile-dwelling settlement excavated in the lake and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2011 as part of the prehistoric pile dwellings around the Alps. The Marktplatz in front is a rectangle of pastel gabled houses with cafés under arcades; the lakeshore is a five-minute walk south past the sailing club.

Getting there and timing. Mondsee sits directly off the A1 West motorway between Salzburg and Vienna, and postbus 140 runs from Salzburg main station in about fifty minutes. Parking in the centre is metered and fills by mid-morning in summer. The church is open daily, generally from early morning to dusk, and is at its best in the first hour after opening, when low light comes through the south windows onto Guggenbichler's altars and the coach parties from Salzburg have not yet arrived. Combine it with the Drachenwand hiking path or the ferry across to Scharfling on the far shore.