Reopening museum collection

The Museum am Dom is the oldest diocesan museum in Austria. Providing up-to-date, contemporary mediation of sacral content is the core task of this cultural institution, which is located in the heart of the city – directly on the Domplatz. The museum’s collection, which also includes numerous medieval works of art, will be accessible again in 2024 after an extensive redesign. Annually changing special exhibitions focus on the most diverse aspects of ecclesiastical art of all epochs and their social impact. 

“Schädelkult & Stiftstumult: 1.000 Jahre Hippoly­t­kloster” (skull cult & monastery tumult. 1,000 years of the Hippolytus Monastery) 

Around the year 800 CE, a monastery was founded on the site of today’s St. Pölten Cathedral Square and endowed with the relics of the Roman martyr Hippolytus. The monastery quickly developed into an intellectual and economic centre, giving rise to a town around it; the close links between the town and the monastery can still be seen today in the name of St. Pölten, which goes back to Saint Hippolytus. 

The exhibition illuminates the roughly thousand-year history of the oldest monastery on Lower Austrian soil, which was dissolved by Emperor Joseph II in 1784 and eventually became the present-day episcopal seat. 

“Wir sind Gefangene des Augenblickes: Der Luftschutzkeller der Diözese St. Pölten” (we are prisoners of the moment: the air-raid shelter of the diocese of St. Pölten) 

The exhibition in the air-raid shelter of the diocese building makes the originally preserved rooms accessible to the public and thus offers a direct window of time into the fateful weeks of spring 1945 that is unique for St. Pölten.