Passau, on the south-eastern edge of Germany near the Austrian border, is set in a spectacular river location with a castle perched above one of Germany’s most beautiful historical city centres. Travellers should know it well, but it is no household name.

Passau, where the Danube, Inn and Ilz meet, has benefited over almost 2000 years from Roman, German, Austrian, Italian, Bohemian and even Hungarian connections, many carried there on the waters of the rivers and most still obvious now. Also following the rivers was an ancient salt trade, which established Passau’s links with Bohemia and Austria and provided much of its wealth.

Passau has also become an attraction for lovers of organ music. One of the world’s largest church organs is in the Baroque cathedral and inexpensive lunch recitals take place six days a week in summer and over the Christmas period.

The remodelled city centre has not overshadowed the charm of the old town, which near the confluence at Dreiflüsse-Eck narrows into a network of archways, stairways and cobbled lanes with a distinctly Italian feel and well worth exploration. Baroque is the dominant style there and along the walled promenade on the Inn’s north bank.

The narrow Höllgasse starts at the Untere Donaulände boat landings and runs parallel with the Danube through to Rathausplatz with its galleries, boutiques and gift shops. It is crossed by the steep Pfaffengasse, itself spanned by a connecting archway with a giant St Christopher painting. Innbrückgasse enters vaulted archways underneath the bishops’ palace complex. 

Signs of Catholic piety are everywhere. The St-Michaels-Kirche (or Studienkirche) and the adjacent former Jesuit college are above the Inn river bank on Schwabgässchen. The abbey church of Kloster Niedernburg on Jesuitengasse has the grave of the blessed abbess Gisela, once queen of the saint Stephen I of Hungary.

The path along the Innkai to Dreiflüsse-Eck, below the palace complex, makes an ideal summer evening stroll. And there are beautiful views – one from a castle and one from a pilgrimage church perched less than a kilometre from the Austrian border.

Rome leaves its mark on Passau

The Romans, who always understood the value of location, built five forts in succession at a post of their northern imperial frontier, on the border of the Raetia and Noricum provinces, at what they called Castra Batavia (now the old town or Altstadt) and a settlement called Boiodurum (now the Innstadt) – the Celts already inhabited this site. Two Roman quadrangular forts (one early in the 1st century and one 4th century) were laid on the spit now occupied by the old town, exploiting the Danube river trade, another (late 1st century) further west. The settlement on the spit was later called Batavis or Passavium, early forms of the city name, which referred to the barbarian Batavian troops stationed here. The Roman boat harbour, near the modern Römerplatz, was on the Danube side of the old town.

Another rectangular fort was built in today’s Innstadt opposite the spit at Dreiflüsse-Eck. But Römermuseum Kastell Boiotro in the Innstadt precinct has been developed around the ruined foundations of a later, oddly pentagonal, fortified camp on the south bank of the Inn. Finds there start from the 3rd century. The museum is open at weekends to explain Roman frontier life, using scale models and exhibits of local archaeology.

Burials were also near the site and a grave monument naming Faustian, an Illyrian Customs officer, today forms part of a baptismal font close to the southern entrance of the St Severin cemetery church. It shows the importance of trade was growing.

Church, salt and riches

After the Romans came the church. St Severin established a small prayer cell for monks in Passau’s Innstadt in the mid-5th century. Today the Romanesque-Gothic cemetery church bearing his name stands on the south bank of the Inn near the footbridge known as Fünferlsteg. Late-medieval gravestones are among those set into the church walls. The stone gate to Lederergasse is known as Severintor.

In the 8th century St Boniface organised what became one of Europe’s biggest bishoprics, stretching along the Danube, through Austria and into Hungary. This again put Passau on a frontier – this time a Christian one – and gave it a large role in bringing God’s word to eastern Europe.

About the same time of Boniface’s foundation, the Passau convent Kloster Niedernburg was established. In the 1040s the blessed Gisela, widow of the Hungarian king St Stephen and sister of the Holy Roman emperor Heinrich II, entered the convent, an estate that long answered directly to the emperors, and became its abbess. Heinrich, as events turned out, played a large part in making Passau bishops imperial princes by granting them forest lands to the north, although their temporal reach never matched their spiritual territory.

Gisela died in the 1060s and her relics lie in the largely 12th century Romanesque convent church Klosterkirche zum Heiligen Kreuz in Jesuitengasse. An arm bone was reunited with bones of her husband in Hungary in 1996. It is common to see Hungarian red-white-green ribbons on tributes left by pilgrims on the grave in the south-east corner of this unassuming church.

The Benedictine foundation was under the control of the Passau bishops when they formally became prince-bishops early in the 13th century. In the 17th century, the convent was later taken over by the sisterhood later known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (now Congregatio Jesu) founded by the unconventional English nun and educator Mary Ward.

Because of its religious scholars and its historical reach, Passau became a centre for theological studies and the Jesuits established a college and church that burned in a destructive city fire in 1662. The Baroque Studienkirche St Michael and a seminary were erected in their place and Catholic theology is now studied in a faculty of Passau’s university.

For centuries, Passau’s position between the power centres of Bavaria, Bohemia and Austria played to its advantage, while Italian influences were also present. From the 8th century its bishops began to benefit from the salt trade from Reichenall and Salzburg (and later Hallein) to the south – which was vital to Bohemia to the north – and the rivers were the important routes.

The confluence at Passau became an important port for unloading, marketing and transshipment of salt, which arrived more efficiently by boat. It could then go on to Austria (on the Danube) and Bohemia (usually via the mule pathways known as “golden trails” or by horse and cart). Salt was also used to produce ceramics and harden steel – industries that would become important to Passau – and local salt merchants prospered. The 13th century tower Schaiblingsturm, which marks the medieval salt harbour, is on the Innkai.

This wealth helped establish the power base of Passau’s medieval prince-bishops and the trappings of church magnificence – a castle, a cathedral and successive palaces – appeared. The bishops even built their own opera house. Passau became known for its manufacture of swords, porcelain, musical instruments and bells.

Baroque Passau emerges

The 1662 fire demanded Baroque rebuilding, notably of the Gothic cathedral Dom St Stephan and the adjacent bishop’s residence. For the most part it was Italian artists and craftsmen who provided the brilliance. The cathedral today is one of the most dazzling ensembles of exterior design, ceiling frescoes and stucco in Germany, built to the innovative plans of Prague resident Carlo Lurago and the Italian architect Paolo d’Aglio.

The opulent stucco work is by Giovanni Battista Carlone and frescoes by Carpoforo Tencalla feature the stoning of St Stephen. The organ, the world’s largest cathedral organ until the mid-1990s, has almost 18,000 pipes. The adjacent treasury can be reached through the cathedral.

The Rococo stairs to the bishops’ late Baroque and Neoclassical Neue Residenz from the west door at Residenzplatz are among Germany’s most impressive, including stucco decoration, a ceiling fresco on the theme of the gods of Olympus protecting Passau, and cherubs. In the square outside, the fountain Wittelsbacher Brunn is also Baroque, but from the early 20th century. The Alte Residenz goes back to the 12th century and had several rebuilding phases. The connecting Saalbau houses the cathedral treasury (with Romanesque, Gothic and Baroque art) and Diözesanmuseum, which includes the episcopal residence and library, episcopal and pilgrimage history (enter from cathedral’s south aisle).

Passau has a second pilgrimage site. Away from the old town, on the hill above the main Inn bridge, is the abbey church of Mariahilf at the top of more than 300 pilgrim steps, the Mariahilfstiege. The church became a centre for devotion after the Holy Roman emperor Leopold I prayed there successfully for victory over the Ottomans in 1683. The main monastery buildings are contemporary with the emperor’s visit. At the church altar, a copy of Lucas Cranach the elder’s Mary with Christ child painting (c1540) stands in place of the original that was once in the church. The passage and its 19th century cross stations are used by pilgrims and a less intrusive alternative route to the abbey is the second set of steps from Innstadtkellerweg (the first set is closed).

Habsburg imperial rule in Bohemia from the early 16th century undercut the Passau salt trade there with heavy tolls and salt import via Passau was banned almost two centuries later. Napoleon, who set up a headquarters at the Neue Residenz in 1809, with his secularisation of German episcopal states brought an end to the many centuries of the prince-bishops’ worldly power. Passau became part of Bavaria.

Passau is where history and legend meet

Stories follow rivers, trade and the church, so a legend was bound to grow. Passau plays a role in the greatest work of medieval German literature, the verse epic Das Nibelungenlied, which draws together mythology, legend and fragments of history and was composed anonymously about 1200.

There are Norse and Frankish elements, a Gothic hero, a figure associated with Attila the Hun and parallels with romance. This version of the ancient Nibelung tale is usually associated with the Passau bishop Wolfger and may have been composed in Passau, where a party of Burgundian royalty stop on their travel through Vienna to Hungary as part of the action.

It is speculated that the Nibelungenlied poet – or at least the author of later interpolations in the poem’s surviving manuscripts – had a special relationship with Kloster Niedernburg (Wolfger was granted control of the monastery). Niedernburg is assumed to be the Passau monastery or convent mentioned in one verse. A predecessor of Wolfger by almost 200 years, the bishop Pilgrim – who was supposedly a kinsman of the Burgundian royal house and also controlled the monastery – appears as a minor character. Pilgrim battled for Passau’s independence from the Salzburg diocese and pushed for the Passau diocese’s inclusion of Hungary for missionary purposes. Wolfger hoped to have Pilgrim canonised.

Wolfger, an experienced traveller, crusader and patron of minstrels and scholars, knew the poet Walther von der Vogelweide (he once bought a pricey fur coat from him) and had wide dealings, including negotiating the release of Richard the Lionheart from an Austrian castle. He was for a time excommunicated for his role in papal and imperial politics but later became an Italian duke and patriarch of Aquileia on the Adriatic Sea. Such were the adventures of Passau bishops of the period.

But as well as much academic and critical debate, the mention of Passau in the Nibelungenlied has inspired the late Romantic painting from the legend in the Passau Rathaus, as well as some local names.

Several centuries later the tale was given the Wagner treatment in his great Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle of operatic dramas, with a rather different plot line. Ultimately, the case for Passau authorship of the Nibelungenlied rests on one poet’s close knowledge of Passau and its surroundings – something today’s travellers will also find rewarding.

Finding the medieval Passau

Also acquiring legendary status were swords forged locally and stamped with a rough version of the Passau emblem of the wolf in a running gait. The Wolfsklingen swords were made from Styrian steel in Passau from at least the 13th century and the inlaid brass stamps came to be considered like a charm, so that manufacturers of other cities copied them. The trade included knives and ceremonial weapons. The skill of the Passau craftsmen was widely acknowledged and they were sought by the English royal court. Passau’s importance, at least in volume of swords, faded in the 17th century.

In addition to the Schaiblingsturm, parts of Passau’s medieval walls are visible around the Inn side of the old town and at Dreiflüsse-Eck. But walls long protected the cathedral and old town from the west and further defences shielded an area as far west as today’s Am Schanzl and Ludwigsplatz. In the Innstadt, which had its own defences, a line of medieval walls and small towers stretches east from the Severintor at Lindental into Jahnstrasse around the Boiotro museum precinct. On Lindental a substantial medieval tower is now incorporated into a residence.

The Venetian Gothic Altes Rathaus, which goes back to at least the late 13th century, has been much altered since the 1622 fire, notably by the addition of a Neogothic tower. On the Rathausplatz facade are historicist 20th century paintings of the Bavarian Holy Roman emperor Ludwig IV (centre) with standard-bearers of the electorates of Bavaria, Cologne, Trier and Saxony. Both its assembly halls were stuccoed by Carlone later in the 17th century and in the 19th century the Passau artist Ferdinand Wagner painted the main hall (Grosser Rathaussaal) ceilings with a scene from the 1676 Passau wedding of the emperor Leopold I and the Nibelung episode of the protagonist Kriemhild entering Passau (at a time the other Wagner’s operas were in high vogue).

The facade also shows the Danube’s historical flood markers indicating the many deluges the city has survived. In June 2013 the flood reached well over 12 metres, the second highest recorded. The tower glockenspiel sounds three or four times daily. 

Passau’s castle view

Veste Oberhaus, the 13th century Gothic castle on the Georgsberg high above the Danube and overlooking the old town, is the former fortress of the Passau prince-bishops and later a military prison. As was often the case with ruling bishops, they from time to time had to take refuge there against rebellious townspeople.

Apart from the spectacular view, which shows the blue Danube, green Inn and black Ilz meeting, there is the excellent OberhausMuseum Passau, pulling together the themes of the city’s complex history including the importance of the salt trade, medieval life and craft guilds, a historical pharmacy, firefighting museum and porcelain with the help of multimedia exhibits. The St George chapel with its vault paintings – older than the castle – is a highlight.

The shuttle bus from Rathausplatz makes for an easier climb than the steep path Ludwigsteig, which involves a good deal of effort. The city’s youth hostel is also part of the castle. The Veste Niederhaus fort at the river junction below, though connected by battlements, is closed to the public and the best view of it is from a river ferry – a 45-minute cruise around the old town is ideal for this – or Dreiflüsse Eck.

Enjoy the view – it’s one of Germany’s best.