The Innsbrucker Labyrinth

Last summer I regaled my gentle readers with the story of the Innsbrucker Scylla and Charybdis. Time passed, and that monster was vanquished (perhaps when the wine bar on the riverbank side of the farmers’ market noticed that a lack of pedestrian access was cutting into its profits). But its always possible that when one monster dies, another will take its place and occupy the vacant real estate, or ecological niche if you want to go all second-edition-Dungeons-and-Dragons. I see a labyrinth with walls and paths which shift and turn when I am not looking, and while I am pretty sure that the dung on the street belongs to the horses which pull the tourist carriages, and all the cows in town are up in the high pastures for the summer, I am not so sure that there is not a minotaur lurking about, perhaps in the depths of the underground parking garage under the Marktplatz. For something built metres away from a river, it descends through a surprising numbers of spiralling turns, and that raises another disturbing possibility. Did the diggers of the storm drain delve too greedily and too deep? The Nordkette has been wrapped in an unseasonable fog split only by flashes like lightning of late …

Since I took this photo, the labyrinth has vanished and been replaced with a fish market. But I would not be surprised if the dragons across the street take up residence there, or a sea serpent wriggles its way up from the Inn across the stones which Hapsburg engineers enthusiastically laid in concrete to keep the Inn within its bounds. If the last few years have taught me anything, it is that monsters are not as easy to banish as we think.