Peru through the millennia

The 1983 provincial exhibition was a premiere: for the first time, the focus was not on the province of Lower Austria, and for the first time it was not about the art or history of the country, but about Peru, an important South American country with a culture dating back thousands of years.

Peru is always in the public eye when “news of the new discovery of a mysterious Inca jungle city goes around the world, when sensational reports about supposedly inexplicable archaeological mysteries and wonders are made public or a new publication speaks of the horror of destruction that the Spanish soldiery of the Conquista era brought upon the flourishing indigenous culture of the Incas”, explained exhibition director Ferdinand Anders.

When planning the exhibition, it was important to obtain first-hand information from leading experts and scholars from the country itself. The fact that Austria and Peru belonged to a common, mighty empire in the era in which the castle was rebuilt into the Renaissance palace it is today was one more point of contact. As Charles I, Emperor Charles V was also King of Spain and therefore also King of Peru.

At the time when the Turks laid siege to Vienna for the first time in 1529, Francisco Pizarro was just about to advance south from Panama. Not only did he encounter the huge Inca empire, he “was able to secure the Inca Atahualpa with a bold coup d'état and become governor for his royal master. The Viceroyalty of Peru soon emerged, which became the most important Spanish overseas territory due to its size and importance” (Anders).

The reign of the Habsburgs in Peru ended two centuries later, in 1700: “During this period, the House of Austria created its very own system of humane colonization, transferring academic culture to the New World in a special way, laying the foundations for the establishment of the viceroyalty, exploring and colonizing the vast territories of the Americas, founded new cities or built them in place of the old, pre-Columbian settlements, spread the faith, brought the Spanish language, the wheel, the book and the law books based on Roman law,” wrote Fernando Belaunde Terry, President of the Republic of Peru, in the exhibition catalog.

Exhibition director Ferdinand Anders commented on the presentation of pre-Columbian cultures, which took up the most space in the show: “Here, ancient Peru has nothing provincial about it, but all the characteristics of one of the great areas of world culture.”

The national exhibition was described by experts from Peru as one of the largest presentations of history and the country ever shown outside the country, comparable only to an official Peru exhibition that was shown in Paris in 1968.

Schallaburg Castle