Stock im EisenHistoric relic, dead wood

This is not really a tree anymore. It is the 2.19 metre midsection of a spruce that started growing around 1400 and was felled only forty years later, and it has spent the roughly 500 years since being hammered full of nails. Traveling locksmiths and other craftsmen, passing through Vienna on their journeyman years, drove a nail into the trunk for luck before moving on, a tradition already old by 1533, the year it first appears in writing. Five iron bands now hold the wood together, one stamped 1575 with the initials of Hans Buettinger, the house owner who had it repaired. Dendrochronologists finally dated the wood itself in 1975, confirming the tree grew for barely four decades before it was cut down and put to this second, much longer life as a good luck charm. It stands today behind glass on the corner of Graben and Kärntner Straße, built into the wall of the Palais Equitable, a few steps from St Stephen's Cathedral. Every visitor to Stephansplatz walks past it, and most have no idea that the metal-studded stump on the corner used to be a living tree, felled while Vienna was still a walled medieval town.