Graben

Vienna


Today Vienna's most elegant shopping street, Graben began life as a ditch dug by the Romans to protect Vinodoba. In 1192 Leopold V filled in the ditch and built a defensive city wall that ended at Freyung, financed by the ransom paid by arch-rival Richard the Lionheart – at that time, kept under lock and key in a castle near Dürnstein, on the Danube.