Melk Benedictine abbey lies some 50 miles west of Vienna. It is a magnificent sight, this golden-coloured building which stretches for several hundred metres along the summit of a bluff overlooking the Danube. It looks best when viewed from below, from the town of the same name. It is also the town of Sankt Koloman, or St Colman, as he would be known in Ireland, the land of his birth.
Koloman - let us stay with his Austrian name - was on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1012 when he entered history. At the time, it was was widely accepted that he was the son of an Irish king, reputedly Malachy, the High King deposed by Brian Boru in 1002 and who later succeeded Brian after he died at the battle of Clontarf in 1014.
Koloman's route to Jerusalem took him along the north side of the Danube, where he no doubt availed of the hospitality at the many houses of Irish monks there. It was also a territory at war, and he was taken prisoner by one of the sides at Stockerau, near Vienna. He was unable to give a satisfactory account of himself - he could not understand his captors and they could not understand him. When he spoke Irish it only made matters worse. His captors decided he was a spy, and hanged him. As the late Cardinal O Fiaich commented in his GaelScrinte i gCein: "Is cosuil gurbh e an chead duine e a thug a bheatha ar son na teanga." (It seems he was the first person to give his life for the [Irish] language.)
But, lo and behold, no sooner had the soldiers hanged Koloman than the dead elder tree which they had used for that purpose burst into flower. Sick people, it was found, were cured when they touched the corpse. Koloman's nails and hair continued to grow and, then at least, his body remained uncorrupted. When these various miracles were brought to the attention of the local Babenberg ruler, Margrave Heinrich I, and recognising a political advantage, he ordered that the body of Koloman be brought across the Danube to Melk, his seat of power.
So on October 13th, 1014, the command was duly carried out, with much pomp and ceremony and a bishop presiding, six months after Koloman's reputed father Malachy had re-assumed the high kingship of Ireland following the death of Brian Boru. Koloman was interred in the Peterskirche, on the hill at Melk. Sainthood followed, with October 13th chosen as his feast day.
The Babenbergs enhanced the influence thus accruing to them still further by persuading the Benedictines to found a monastery there with the saint's shrine in it. This happened in 1089, and Koloman was adopted as the patron saint of Austria. He was to remain so solely until 1663, when he was joined by St Leopold.
St Koloman's chapel is next to the high altar on the gospel side of the church, with a chapel of St Benedict facing it on the other side. His remains rest in a sarcophagus over the altar in his chapel. Above it, and rising the entire height of the wall in a riot of glorious gilded carving, there is a lifesize, half-kneeling Koloman holding his pilgrim staff. On the ground in front of him lies the crown forgone by him for love of God. However, as the wise might point out, with hindsight, his succession was not assured had he returned safely to Ireland. ithe gofhreasura" (kings with opposition).
An Austrian guide conducted us through the monastery museum, and regaled us with Koloman's history, but he was unaware of Cardinal O Fiaich's "red-haired man" story about the saint. According to this, marriageable maidens from the region used pray to "Heiligen Sankt Koloman", asking him to send them a husband "abur nur kein' Roten" - a husband, yes, but not a red-haired one. They feared that, being an Irishman, he might send them such.
Afterwards I made my way back to Vienna, (for this is the story of a personal pilgrimage), where I took the underground from the Westbahnof across the city to a tower called the Schottentor, which stands on the Schottenring section of the famous Vienna Ringstrasse, not far from the Schottenbastei, and I walked from there along a connecting street, the Schottengasse, to the Schottenstift (now another Benedictine abbey) and its associated church, the Schottenkirche, for an evening meal in the adjacent Schottenkeller.
As I ate, I mused on the Irish monks and pilgrims in that part of the world who had successfully avoided the fate of Koloman, and who had given their earlier Germanic name - Schotten - to that part of Vienna which has since been identified with them. The brochure I had picked up at the museum in Schotenstift explained it all. Entitled, "Museum, Monastery of the Scots" it reads: "The Viennese monastery of the Scots, founded in 1155 by the Duke of Babenberg, is one of the most magnificent Benedictine monasteries in Austria.
"Until the beginning of the 15th century, the use of the monastery was reserved exclusively for Irish monks: the Latin term for Ireland was `Scotia maior', thus the name Scots. It was not until 1418 that the Pope issued a decree ordering the monastery to open its doors to people of all nationalities, and in the years that followed, especially in the 15th and 16th centuries, the monastery blossomed into an important center for spiritual life in Vienna."
To return to Koloman. Not far from that part of Vienna, beside the cathedral - the Stefansdom - recent excavations for an underground station have revealed a mortuary chapel 40 feet or so below the surface. It is called the Virgilkapelle, after our own St Fearghal of Salzburg and Bregenz. Of even greater interest, in the context of Koloman, there is authoritive opinion (R. Feucthmueller: Der Wiener Stefansdom) that Frederick the Quarrelsome, the last of the Babenberger dukes, who died in 1246, intended the chapel as a crypt for Koloman, but the plan went awry when the duke died prematurely.
Tomas F O Cofaigh is a former governor of the Central Bank.
