One of our three nights in Vienna happens to be Long Night. The list of museums looks impressive and will probably allow us to see a lot more during the days if we do this. Has anyone attended Long Night? Are all the exhibits open in each museum or just some of them?
Posted by
Vienna, Austria
5382 posts
Everything is open in the listed museums. It is very crowded, however, so don’t expect to move very fast. I don’t go exactly for that reason. Note - Vienna has many Long nights for different subject areas. It might help you to be specific and refer to this as the Long Night of Museums.
Posted by
1902 posts
The Long Night of Museums provides access to 130+ museums, some of them rather odd and not easily accessible normally. You should concentrate on those because this is a unique opportunity to visit them. The big and famous museums like KHM (Museum of Fine Arts), NHM (Museum of Natural History), etc. are open throughout the year anyway.
Posted by
Charm City USA
183 posts
I went every year when I lived in Vienna.
Generally sites had their regular collections open. But it's not just getting into museums for that. Some places routinely accessible also open up rooms not typically available. Many sites have special programming too. I used to go to the Shoenberg Center where they had free concerts. Sometimes it was a premier of modern classical. Always something of Schoenberg's. Outstanding talent.
The Jewish museum on Judenplatz had a great tour to the old synagogue foundation under the square.
Once I went to the Bohemian museum near Landstrasse which was basically stuff collected from Czech immigrants'attics. It was funky, fusty, and fascinating.
It's a good chance to see the freize at the Secession (be there very early) which is otherwise expensive to get in (imo).
They run special shuttles (buses and trams) on the Long Night to help you get around. It's true that the 'famous' museums will be crowded, but it's tons of fun. Lots of families out. The atmosphere is something like Halloween with everyone out on a treasure hunt after dark.
Spend some time with the program and make a route. I recommend picking an offbeat site or two because you never know what you might find.
Enjoy!