Graz

At the farmer’s market in Kaiser Josef Platz in the heart of Graz old countrywomen with faces weather-beaten to the shade and texture of redwood bark stand behind trestle tables laden with tubs of home pickled beetroot, baskets of forced endives, rocket and pis-en-lit, ranks of thick horseradish roots and wicker besoms overflowing with walnuts. There are a dozen varieties of apples and potatoes, bags of large, creamy kidney beans flecked with crimson – kaferbohnen and wechselbohnen - flagons of kurbiskernol, the local roast pumpkin seed oil, a thick, resinous liquid that looks black in the bottle but when poured reveals itself to be a green of unfathomable darkness; home-baked strudels filled with sweet cream cheese and dark bread rolls that when split give off the rich scent of molasses. There are flasks of red currant and wild raspberry syrup, butchers blocks lined with pale ranks of the famous Styrian capons and poulards and smoked ham in leg-size hunks.

Such a bucolic scene in many ways typifies Austria’s second city. Graz may be the European City of Culture for 2003 but it has always been the capital of Steiermark, larder of the Habsburg Empire. For every spot-lit shop selling Helmut Lang jeans and Prado sneakers there is another packed with boiled wool in shades of forest, fern, spruce and slate, where pleated blouses and horn-toggled jackets vie for space with felt hats decorated with badger hair brushes and ankle length skirts so stiffly starched they look like they’d refuse to billow even in a hurricane. For every minimalist bar with its own website, Gaggia machine and house-style of bruschetta there is a curlicue-laden café where you can drink the milky coffee known as melange and nibble chocolate-and-marzipan desserts. Graz is an urban landscape which for all the dynamism of modern architectural flourishes such as Domenig and Eisenkock’s Mursteg bridge and Klaus Kada’s black cuboid WC in the Zeughaus Umbau still exudes the calm and pleasant charm of a stately and well-preserved county town at the tail end of a long-term boom in agricultural prices.

On the journey into the city from the airport the taxi driver converses in English learnt from his grand kids. “I am grandmother for six children,” he chuckles. He has a head the shape and colour of a bread dumpling. “Graz” he says as we drive through a landscape so perfectly arranged it might have been constructed by a particularly meticulous model railway enthusiast “is Austria’s second largest connurbation. There are 240,000 inhabitants and 30 crematoriums”. I wonder how often this last word crops up in English classes at the local primary school as we pass into an outer suburb of five storey apartment blocks, the sort of street corner European bars in which a lone middle-aged man in a maroon v-neck will be smoking king-size and staring into his lager and shops selling orthopaedic underwear in shades of pinkish fawn. “We are nicknamed “City of Gardens, “ the taxi driver continues merrily, “Because 90% of the area of greater Graz is parkland, forest or fields”.

There is a reason for the greenery that adds to the city’s rural flavour. Raymond Chandler famously and sourly described Los Angeles as a dozen suburbs in search of a city. Graz by the same sardonic criteria is a half-a-dozen villages that found a fortress. The Schlossberg, a 120metre high plug of dolomite that looms above the pantiles and elaborately rendered gables of the city centre was the geographical stronghold that drew Graz together.

Nowadays you can reach the top of this, steep, tree-covered hillock on a Victorian funicular railway, the interior of the carriages red-and-silver like a London bus, or in a modern glass elevator that shoots up through a dark tunnel of rock and emerges into light by the Uhrturm, a solid clock tower that is the symbol of Graz and under which, according to the literature of the local tourist board, many natives experience their first kiss (though when I go up one evening after dinner the teenagers who surround it seem to have moved well past that stage).

From the Schlossberg you can see for miles in every direction, up and down the valley of the river Mur, along the Stiftingbach towards Weiz and to the foothills of the Slovenian Alps. No army could approach undetected. The originally Slavic inhabitants of Styria built a fort here (Graz is a corruption of gradec, the Slavic word for fort). Later Bavarian settlers expanded it and then the Habsburgs made it a strongpoint in a series of defences that that ringed the city

The Schlossberg drew Graz together, but it was the belligerence of neighbouring Turkey that bound it. For a western European country Austria is a long way east. Graz is almost directly north of Zagreb. From the middle of the 15th Century until the early 1700s Graz formed a bulwark against the armies of the Ottomans as they menaced Inner Austria. And the Ottomans took their menacing seriously. In Graz Cathedral, a rococo masterpiece where the pulpit is gilded and panelled with portraits in the style and colours of 18th C porcelain, cherubs blow trumpets and Christ sits on a throne of gold that throws out a shower of gilded beams (In this vision of heaven you feel sure the angels would sit on clouds made of meringue), there is a fresco from an earlier and less august age. It depicts scenes from 1485 an annus horribilis in the history of the city during which it suffered an epidemic of the Black Death, was attacked by locusts, which, if the artist is correct, were the size of falcons, and was then set upon by Turks determined on evisceration and enslavement

Half a century later Islamic chronicler Celasade Nicanbasi noted of that year’s campaigning with barely suppressed glee: “All over, German lands were ravaged and burned; heavens pure air was polluted with thick smoke; and every religious place of refuge for the infidels was destroyed and turned into wastelands”. Perhaps unsurprisingly in contemporary Austrian woodcuts Turks traditionally wear the evil sneer of pantomime villains.

The Renaissance Landeshaus is the central wonder of Graz’s old town, a Unesco World Heritage site whose covered alleyways complete with pale, curved ceilings lead to arcaded courtyards and call to mind, somewhat ironically given the history, the Moorish south. The Landeshaus was home of the provincial parliament, a body which for much of the 16th Century spent 2/3rds of its annual budget on holding the Turks at bay. Expanded by the Italian architect Domenico d’Allio in 1565 it is a place of bronze green roofing, covered balconies and taupe rendered walls, where cobbled paths give onto a paved central square and the two-tired walkways that span it have upper balustrades topped with stone obelisks. An ornate water fountain has a bronze canopy and a statue of a knight, lance in one hand, the other placed lightly on a cocked hip. This peaceful, shaded Italianate sanctuary flanks a plainer and more rugged looking building the Landeszeughaus, an armoury designed by another Italian, Antonio Solaris.

The Landeszeughaus is home to 29,000 weapons the vast majority from the 17th century. It has outer walls four feet thick, dark wooden floors, a low ceiling supported by rough oak beams and smells of pitch and possibly brimstone. The lighting is low. Suits of cuirassiers armour mounted on wooden stands, are arranged in ranks facing the mullioned windows - martial manikins. The arms and leg portions are segmented and jointed like the shell of some giant crustaceans, the eye-slits in the blackened steel helmets vacant yet menacing.

Ivory inlaid flintlock pistols carried in pairs by the cavalry who discharged them into the faces of adversaries from the distance of a few paces are racked along the walls alongside firelock muskets, warhammers, steel bucklers and rows of morning stars – a six foot wooden pole with a knife blade at one end and a spiked steel ball at the other that was designed to maim horses.

From the windows of the Zeughaus you can look across the rooftops of the main throughfare of Herrengasse, scalloped pantiles, topped with a turquoise spine and beyond to the gilded, bulb-shaped domes of the churches. The Ottomans and the Habsburgs fought one another for over four hundred years. Austria’s military border with Turkey was not dismantled until 1881 and that decision owed less to any growing trust between the two empires than to the enfeeblement of the regime in Istanbul.

The relationship between the Habsburgs and Ottomans was never cordial, but you cannot live next door to people for so many years without some cultural exchanges. Coffee, for example, crossed the border to become an Austrian staple. Graz’s most popular local brand, the excellent Hornig, features an Islamic sultan on the label. The lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683 is said to have given birth to the croissant and it was an incident during the Turkish investment of the Schlossberg that inspired the confectioner Josef Strehli to create one of Graz’s most famous cakes. The tale has it that the Ottoman commander Ibrahim Pasha sat down to eat a roast chicken in the Palais Sarau in Sporgasse when a cannonball fired by the defenders crashed in through the front window and landed on his plate. The chicken went sailing out through the rear window and Ibrahim followed it never to return. A painted wooden carving of his torso can be seen beneath the gable of the Palais Sarau, while down the road at the Café Strehli you can buy the Grazer Schlossbergkugel (“castle cannonball”), the rich chocolate truffle that honours the event.

It sometimes appears that no famous person or action in Austrian history has gone without a cake being baked in commemoration. You half expect to come across an Anschlusstorte or a Waldheimschnitten. How Graz’s most famous son Arnold Schwarzenegger has gone so long without having some suitably chunky gateaux named after him is a mystery. Perhaps they have yet to invent a pastry wooden enough for the task.

Hofbakerei Edegger-Tax, just around the corner from the scene of Ibrahim Pasha’s disgrace was established in 1569. The carved wood exterior is a shade of richest caramel. Inside you can buy boxes of Sissibusserl, a tiny macaroon the size of quail’s egg filled with apricot jam and decorated with a dribble of dark chocolate that was a favourite of the tragic Empress Elizabeth, expert horsewoman, poet, beauty and pioneering weight-watcher whose life was so filled with disasters it reads like a grisly regal version of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch (Son committed suicide with teenage mistress, brother-in-law shot by Mexican patriots, cousin declared insane then found dead in suspicious circumstances, sister killed in a fire at a Parisian charity bazaar, her own life ended by a knife wielding Italian patriot. Luckily she didn’t live to see her nephew assassinated at Sarajevo and her husband Franz-Joseph plunge Europe into The Great War).

The other, less melancholy speciality of the house are Panthertatzen (The symbol of Styria is a panther. Banners in the Landeszeughaus show a minatory white beast with two tails apparently gifted with the ability to blow fire out of all its orifices, though this may only have been when on military duty). These crisp, tongue-shaped biscuits of pumpkin seed and almonds were a favourite of Archduke Johann.

Johann was an important figure in the history of Graz. After the fighting with the Turks had moved east into Hungary and south into Bosnia and the war of the second coalition against Napoleon had ended with another Austrian humiliation (one in which the 18 year old Johan played his part, leading an army to defeat at the battle of Hohenlinden) and, as part of the peace settlement, the total destruction of the Schlossberg fortifications, the city, demilitarised, found itself at something of a loose end. It became a place of retirement for civil servants and army officers. Like Cheltenham without the racecourse, it was cruelly nicknamed Pensionopolis.

A liberal who broke with royal protocol to marry the daughter of a provincial postmaster Johann revitalised Graz and the surrounding province, sponsoring the arts, founding the Johanneum, a scientific and teaching institute, modernising the Styrian mining industry, and establishing a model agricultural estate to the south of the city at which he planted vineyards of the Blaue Wildbacher, the grape used to make Schilcher a rose wine so dry it makes Gros Plant seem like Liebfraumilch.

I drink Schilcher at the Landhausekeller, which has been serving meals for four hundred years and is decorated like the baronial hall of a Victorian industrialist. The food follows a similar pattern of beautifully crafted heftiness. A bowl of pungent pumpkin soup big enough to drown a spaniel in; saddle of venison with red cabbage, pickled walnuts and potato dumplings stuffed with pureed chestnuts is followed with a desert of sweet cheese dumplings tossed in cinnamon crumbs accompanied by stewed red plums. When I have finished the waiter solicitously and wisely proffers a bottle of Underburg bitters. Underburg bitters are flavoured with medicinal herbs and have the alcoholic kick of Polish pure spirit. My one previous encounter with them left me with the impression that drinking Underburg is pretty much akin to swallowing half a dozen pulverized cloves and washing it down with a gulp of liquid paraffin, I am so full, however, I wheeze an affirmative and the waiter fills a glass.

Afterwards I wander up and down the city staggering slightly, less from the alcohol than from the weight of food shifting about inside me like loose cargo in the hold of a freighter, across Alfred Bramberger’s light-speckled Tummelplatz and past the hall of the Teutonic Knights. In Sackstrasse, birthplace of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, Princess Sissi’s nephew, whose assassination sparked the First World War, I look in the windows of the antique shops at necklaces of pink coral and Jugendstihl broaches. At 10pm the Hauptplatz is deserted, quiet except for the deep insistent rumble of the occasional passing tram and the sound of a gypsy violin playing a heart-rending lament. The fiddler, an old man in a fatigue cap and fingerless mittens is standing in the doorway of a Dirndl shop. On the pale cream gable that rises above him a frieze depicts a muscular, Teutonic Saint Christopher striding through a mountain torrent. On the wall of the shop next door, in vivid red, yellow and blue is the Buddhist symbol of yin and yang. Later that night I sit in the stark, modish surroundings of the Augarten Hotel with my stomach full of dumplings and conclude that Graz has got the balance just about right.