Chapter 19

It took Mara two days to prepare herself for the trip, the distance from Tel Aviv Yafo to Vienna is approximately 2360 kilometres, almost four to five hours of flying and I and Mara slept through it, Asmodeus just sat there in his seat occasionally going through the magazines provided.
Before Mara slept, she was a bit uneasy, after Uncle's details didn't check out in the database, he gave the lady at the counter a stare, and she smiled and let him through, it was weird and she wanted to ask what happen and she never got a chance, and when she brought it up in the plane, Asmodeus put her to sleep, she had seen him take control of a person's mind and that memory needed to leave her head.
I woke first them Mara followed as we landed in Austria's capital the amazing city of Vienna.
As we left the Airport, from the arrival point and took our luggage, we stepped out into the streets of Vienna.
The best method of getting around Vienna is via public transportation. A combination system of busses, trams, trains and newer subway lines makes getting around Vienna easy and efficient. This system is relatively inexpensive and is used regularly by both tourists and locals.
We saw a line of taxis wait outside the airport, but Mara suggested we ordered an Uber as it was relatively cheap.
There were all amazing sites to visit in Vienna for instance
Schönbrunn Palace with opulent interiors
St Stephen's Cathedral, a Medieval place of worship and the city's icon
Belvedere Palace is an eighteenth-century palace with an art collection.
Vienna State Opera, with art museum and tours
Kunsthistonsehes Museum Wien, a Museum of fine arts and palatial building.
Albertina, an art museum housed in the Habsburg palace
Prater, a Public park with an iconic giant wheel
Museum Quaritier, a Baroque district containing museums
Austria's Gallery Belvedere, and Art Museum with "Klimt's Kiss".
Vienna has all this but the only attraction that brought us here was The Hofburg, a Baroque Palace complex with Museums, which was rumoured to hold the famous Holy Lance or Spear of Destiny.
The Uber Mara ordered pulled up in front of one of the most magnificent buildings I had ever seen.
The Hofburg is the former principal imperial palace of the Habsburg dynasty. Located in the centre of Vienna, it was built in the 13th century and expanded several times afterwards. It also served as the imperial winter residence, while Schönbrunn Palace was the summer residence. Since 1946 it is the official residence and workplace of the president of Austria.
Since 1279 the Hofburg area has been the documented seat of government. The Hofburg has been expanded over the centuries to include various residences, the imperial chapel, the imperial library, the treasury, the Burgtheater, the Spanish Riding School, and the imperial mews.
The palace faces the Heldenplatz (Heroes Square) ordered under the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph I, as part of what was planned to become the Kaiserforum, but which was never completed.
Numerous architects have executed work at the Hofburg as it expanded, notably the Italian architect-engineer Filiberto Lucchese, Lodovico Burnacini and Martino and Domenico Carlone, the Baroque architects Lukas von Hildebrandt and Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach, Johann Fischer von Erlach, and the architects of the Neue Burg built between 1881 and 1913.
Vienna reaches across the Danube on one side and climbs into the Vienna Woods on the other. There it includes the 1,585-foot (483-metre) Kahlen Mountain (Kahlenberg) and the 1,778-foot (542-metre) Hermanns Mountain (Hermannskogel), Vienna’s highest point. The Vienna Woods slope to the river in four roughly semicircular terraces, with the Innere Stadt occupying the second-lowest terrace. The city has a mean altitude of 1,804 feet (550 metres), but different sections vary considerably in height.
A stretch of the Danube was straightened and confined in the 19th century to form the Danube Canal, a flood-control canal parallel to the mainstream, that flows through the city. An island 13 miles (21 km) long and 750 feet (230 metres) wide was thus created from former flood lands and was equipped as an all-sports park, adding to the city’s already generous recreational space. The Lobau, a wooded section along the river, has, like the Vienna Woods, long been a protected greenbelt area. Since the 1970s the open spaces on the far side of the Danube have been exploited for apartment buildings and factories.
The Holy Lance in Vienna is displayed in the Imperial Treasury or Weltliche Schatzkammer (lit. Worldly Treasure Room) at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria. It is a typical winged lance of the Carolingian dynasty. At different times, it was said to be the lance of Saint Maurice or that of Constantine the Great. In the tenth century, the Holy Roman Emperors came into possession of the lance, according to sources from the time of Otto I (912–973). In 1000, Otto III gave Bolesław I of Poland a replica of the Holy Lance at the Congress of Gniezno. In 1084, Henry IV had a silver band with the inscription "Nail of Our Lord" added to it. This was based on the belief that the nail embedded in the spear tip had been used for the Crucifixion of Jesus. It was only in the thirteenth century that the Lance became identified with that of Longinus, which had been used to pierce Christ's side and had been drenched in water and the blood of Christ.
In 1273, the Holy Lance was first used in a coronation ceremony. Around 1350, Charles IV had a golden sleeve put over the silver one, inscribed Lancea et clavus Domini (Lance and nail of the Lord). In 1424, Sigismund had a collection of relics, including the lance, moved from his capital in Prague to his birthplace, Nuremberg, and decreed them to be kept there forever. This collection was called the Imperial Regalia (Reichskleinodien).[citation needed]
When the French Revolutionary army approached Nuremberg in the spring of 1796, the city councillors decided to remove the Reichskleinodien to Vienna for safekeeping. The collection was entrusted to a Baron von Hügel, who promised to return the objects once the threat was resolved. However, the Holy Roman Empire was disbanded in 1806 and the confusion, he sold the collection to the Habsburgs. The city councillors asked for the return of the collection after the defeat of Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Waterloo, but the Austrian authorities refused.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that the Imperial Insignia "were still preserved in Vienna and appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an everlasting bond of union. When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918, the Austrian Germans instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland". During the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed to Germany, the Nazis brought the Reichskleinodien to Nuremberg, where they displayed them during the September 1938 Party Congress. They then transferred them to the Historischer Kunstbunker, a bunker that had been built into some of the medieval cellars of old houses underneath Nuremberg Castle to protect historic art from air raids.
Most of the Regalia were recovered by the Allies at the end of the war, but the Nazis had hidden the five most important pieces in hopes of using them as political symbols to help them rally for a return to power, possibly at the command of Nazi Commander Heinrich Himmler. Walter Horn — a Medieval studies scholar who had fled Nazi Germany and served in the Third Army under General George S. Patton — became a special investigator in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program after the end of the war, and was tasked with tracking the missing pieces down.[14] After a series of interrogations and false rumors, Nuremberg city councillor Stadtrat Fries confessed that he, fellow councilman Stadtrat Schmeiszner, and an SS official had hidden the Imperial Regalia on March 31, 1945, and he agreed to bring Horn's team to the site. On August 7, Horn and a U.S. Army captain escorted Fries and Schmeiszner to the entrance of the Panier Platz Bunker, where they located the treasures hidden behind a wall of masonry in a small room off of a subterranean corridor, roughly eighty feet below ground. The Regalia were first brought back to Nuremberg castle to be reunited with the rest of the Reichskleinodien and then transferred with the entire collection to Austrian officials the following January.
The Kunsthistorisches Museum has dated the lance to the 8th century. Robert Feather, an English metallurgist and technical engineering writer, tested it for a documentary in January 2003. He was given unprecedented permission not only to examine the lance in a laboratory environment but to remove the delicate bands of gold and silver that hold it together. Based on X-ray diffraction, fluorescence tests, and other non-invasive procedures, he dated the main body of the spear to the 7th century at the earliest. Feather stated in the same documentary that an iron pin – long claimed to be a nail from the crucifixion, hammered into the blade and set off by tiny brass crosses – was "consistent" in length and shape with a 1st-century AD Roman nail. There was no residue of human blood on the lance.
Not long afterwards, researchers at the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for Archeology in Vienna used X-ray and other technology to examine a range of lances and determined that the Vienna lance dates from around the 8th to the beginning of the 9th century, with the nail apparently being of the same metal, and ruled out the possibility of it dating back to the 1st century AD.

SONS OF HELL
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