Crime Museum in Vienna, Austria

Those with a squeamish disposition are adised to skip the Crime Museum in Vienna, Austria (known as KriminalMuseum in German). Tucked away in what seems like a relatively small old building, this place is a veritable TARDIS of gore.
All the text is in German, and the stories of Vienna’s ancient crimes are going to get lost in translation for the non-linguists, but much of the utterly sinister collection is visual. And visceral, for that matter.
The Crime Museum is clearly aimed at the sort of demographic that enjoys walking through extensive cellars, looking at picture after picture of murder victims.
Yes, there are some bits on the sterling work of the police force, but the emphasis is certainly skewed towards rusty torture instruments, brutal weapons and photos of de-limbed torsos being dug up.
But sometimes it’s a refreshing change to settle in for a couple of hours of witch-burnings, violent confession extractions, lynch mobs and mummified heads in jars.
The whole thing is an engaging, morally ambiguous romp through Vienna’s criminal past. Much is ordered chronologically, with illustrated year-by-year and blow-by-blow accounts about the most newsworthy murders complimented by extensive profiles of the crooks. Lovely stuff.

Getting to the Crime Museum in Vienna, Austria

Nearest international airport: Vienna

Using public transport: Get bus number 5A or tram N. The museum is at Große Sperlgasse 24.

More information: Kriminalmuseum

Museum of Contraception and Abortion in Vienna, Austria

A short walk from Vienna’s Westbahnhof is a heavy wooden door, almost specifically designed to make people go away. To get through it, you need to press a buzzer, and once finally upstairs you’re ushered into what looks disturbingly like the waiting room of a family planning clinic.
This is the Museum of Contraception and Abortion (though the tourist board literature prefers to leave that last bit out), and it is a bizarre combination of the serious and the frivolous.
Cases are filled with pills and applicators from through the years, while on the walls pie charts and statistics about illegal abortions are opposite cartoons of Victorian types blowing up condoms in some kind of hilarious parlour game.
It covers the whole gamut – diaphragms to sterilisation, via anti-baby lipstick and bidets designed specifically for a post-coital wash. And then there are some implements where it’s probably best to have a limited understanding of German.

Getting to Vienna

Nearest International Airport: Vienna’s airport is well connected to the rest of the world, although budget airline fans can fly into Bratislava just across the border with Slovakia, and take the short train ride in.
Using public transport: The Museum of Abortion and Contraception is just over the busy main road from Vienna Westbahnhof, which is the city’s major train station. It doesn’t really look like a museum, but the address is 37/1 Mariahilfer Gürtel.

More information: Museum website

Globe Museum in Vienna, Austria

It’s hard to get anything more wholesome than globes, and there are absolutely hundreds of them in the Austrian National Library. Once a private collection, it has now ballooned across an entire floor, and walking in is quite surreal. It’s almost as if someone has gone to the drawing room of every fictional Victorian detective commandeering their globes, then bundled them all willy-nilly into massive glass cabinets. There are 420 of them in total, and just when you think it’s all over, there’s another room with an even higher concentration.
As all good bizarre museums should be, it is ludicrously over-detailed and answers questions you’d never even thought of asking. Has anyone ever seriously thought about how globes are made? Well here you can find out as interactive screens painstakingly go through the process, step by step.
The whole place gives a peek of a whole new world that most of us never knew existed. Making globes is part art, part craft, part science, and old, highly-styled ones are worth a fortune. They date back to 360BC, and a few makers are revered as artists (despite getting countries in the wrong place and covering up parts they didn’t know all that much about with pictures of lions).
One from 1541 is fabulously inaccurate, and we know because an actual map has been superimposed on top of it. Half of Africa is in the Indian Ocean, Jerusalem is in Sudan, New Delhi is where Arabia should be and Tokyo has been transported to Mongolia. Australia, of course, hadn’t been discovered by that time, and is conveniently replaced by a few sea monsters.

Getting to the Globe Museum in Vienna

Nearest international airport: Vienna International Airport.
Using public transport: The Globe Museum at the Austrian National Library can be found in the Palais Mollard, near the Herrengasse U-Bahn station.

International Esperanto Museum in Vienna, Austria

The National Library in Vienna is home to one for the purists: a museum devoted to a language that hardly anyone speaks and no nation recognises as an official mother tongue.
And what could possibly be better than learning Esperanto by playing Pacman? The computer game is the unquestioned highlight of the International Esperanto Museum. A word comes up on the screen, and visitors have to pick the right suffix by eating the correct ghost.
This isn’t quite as implausibly difficult as it sounds. It was designed as an auxiliary language – something the whole world could speak as a second language in order to communicate with each other better – and is structured to be as simple as possible. It also steals heavily from the Latin languages, so anyone with vague Spanish or French is in with a chance. Rapida means fast, urbo means town, sana means healthy – all fairly logical, and the ghosts take a pounding.
The rest of the exhibition charts the history of the language, created in 1887 by well-meaning Pole L. L. Zamenhof, and much of it is brilliantly pointless. There are photos of people meeting at Esperanto congresses (with a predictably high concentration of beards), translations of famous books and headphones where you can listen to people reading in the doomed language. It’s almost enough to make you want to learn out of solidarity.
But it also manages to make the point that the idea of an invented language isn’t quite as silly as many may think. After all, we speak one ourselves. The exhibition runs through everyday English words that have been made up on the spot by someone (usually Shakespeare). Bedroom, amazement, serendipity, fashionable, worthless... even God.
It’s bizarrely gripping, and makes skipping all those spectacular Hapsburg palaces and art galleries seem inherently worthwhile.

Getting to the International Esperanto Museum in Vienna

Nearest international airport: Vienna’s airport is served by a wide range of airlines, and is well connected to the rest of the globe.
Using public transport: The International Esperanto Museum at the Austrian National Library can be found in the Palais Mollard, near the Herrengasse U-Bahn station.