Graz was an imperial capital before Vienna took the title, and the layers show: a 1499 double spiral staircase, a plague fresco from 1485, a mausoleum begun by the emperor who started the Thirty Years' War.
Emperor Friedrich III began this residence in 1438. The 1499 Gothic double spiral staircase splits and rejoins on every floor — a stonemason's puzzle locals call the Staircase of Reconciliation. Open courtyard, no ticket.
Consecrated 1464 as Friedrich III's court church. On the outer south wall the faded 1485 Landplagenbild records the year locusts, plague and Ottoman raiders struck Styria at once. Inside: two 15th-century reliquary chests from Mantua.
Albert Birkle's 1953 chancel window shows Hitler and Mussolini watching Christ's scourging — the artist's answer to the Nazis branding his work degenerate. The church body dates to the 1520s, the Baroque tower to 1780.
Franciscans took over this 13th-century friary in 1515; the fortified bell tower doubled as a defence post on the old city wall. The lanes behind it follow the densest surviving stretch of the medieval street plan in Graz.
Ferdinand II commissioned his tomb in 1614 from court painter Pietro de Pomis; it took a century to complete, with Fischer von Erlach designing the interior in 1687. The emperor who launched the Thirty Years' War lies in the crypt.
Between 1943 and 1945 forced labourers cut roughly 20 km of tunnels through the Schlossberg as air-raid shelters for 40,000 people. Two stretches stay open: the pedestrian Schlossbergstollen and Dom im Berg, now a concert cave.
The Styrian state history collection fills a Baroque palais on Sackstraße: a multimedia panorama of a thousand years, plus the Schaudepot of everyday objects running from Habsburg tax records to 1980s protest banners.
Burned on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, and rebuilt on its original Grieskai footprint in 2000 — one of very few destroyed Austrian synagogues actually reconstructed. The dome glass carries names of deported Styrian Jews.
Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg's 1625 palace is built as a calendar: 365 windows, 31 rooms per floor, 24 state rooms lit by 52 windows. The 1678 Planetary Room frescoes chart the cosmos Kepler mapped while teaching in Graz.
Graz's oldest suburban church, begun 1607 by Pietro de Pomis, anchors Lend — the quarter across the Mur where tanners and carters lived outside the walls. Lendplatz has held a produce market since 1846.
A 1600s Capuchin monastery on Paulustorgasse holding Styrian daily life: painted farmhouse parlours, guild chests, mourning dress and the Trachtensaal of regional costume. The monks' cells and refectory survive as gallery rooms.
Liqueur merchant Gottfried Maurer installed this 24-bell carillon in 1905; two carved figures in Styrian dress turn in the gable at 11:00, 15:00 and 18:00. The square itself served as a medieval grain store yard.