Nehaveigur

For hundreds of years, the Habsburg and Ottoman empires waged war, a conflict that had its roots in the Crusades. The Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1529 and again in 1683.

During the second siege, the Ottomans pillaged the Austrian countryside and terrorized the population, who to them, accustomed to the splendors of Constantinople, must have appeared backwards. At primary school we were told the story how a group of Ottomans on horseback was following a local girl. We weren’t told why they would follow her and were too young to ask. She led them on, never allowing them to come too close. She fled up a hill, and when they eventually almost reached her, she stepped to the side and they plunged off a cliff that was hidden there. They and their horses were swept away by the river below, and she returned a hero. To this day, the cliff is known as Türkensturz, which means Turk Drop. It’s a popular destination on summer days due to its deep, slow flowing water and the beach on the opposite bank from the cliff.

What are the chances that this story, told to school kids more than three hundred years after it supposedly happened, is true?

Most stories like it aren’t true, except that my father had in his possession a curved sword that he had found half-buried beneath the rocks while swimming in the river beneath the cliff. It was rusty and its handle had disintegrated. The shape of the sword wasn’t like any that you could see in old pictures of Austrian soldiers, and in any case, by the time he had found it, the Austrian army hadn’t been issuing swords for a long time. Is it possible that the story was true after all and that a sword by one of the Ottoman horsemen had survived for three hundred years, buried under the sand?

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