Vienna

Vienna (/viˈɛnə/ ^ⓘ vee-EN-ə; German: Wien [viːn] ^ⓘ; Austro-Bavarian: Wean [veɐ̯n]) is the capital, most populous city, and one of nine states of Austria. It is Austria's primate city, with just over two million inhabitants. Its larger metropolitan area has a population of nearly 2.9 million, representing nearly one-third of the country's population. Vienna is the cultural, economic, and political center of the country, the fifth-largest city by population in the European Union, and the most populous of the cities on the river Danube.

The city lies on the eastern edge of the Vienna Woods (Wienerwald), the northeasternmost foothills of the Alps, that separate Vienna from the more western parts of Austria, at the transition to the Pannonian Basin. It sits on the Danube, and is traversed by the highly regulated Wienfluss (Vienna River). Vienna is completely surrounded by Lower Austria, and lies around 50 km (31 mi) west of Slovakia and its capital Bratislava, 60 km (37 mi) northwest of Hungary, and 60 km (37 mi) south of Moravia (Czech Republic).

The Romans founded a castrum at Vienna, which they called Vindobona, in the 1st century, when the region belonged to the province of Pannonia. It was elevated to a municipium with Roman city rights in 212. This was followed by a time in the sphere of influence of the Lombards and later the Pannonian Avars, when Slavs formed the majority of the region's population. From the 8th century on, the region was settled by the Baiuvarii. In 1155, Vienna became the seat of the Babenbergs, who ruled Austria from 976 to 1246. In 1221, Vienna was granted city rights. During the 16th century, the Habsburgs, who had succeeded the Babenbergs, established Vienna as the seat of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, a position it held until the empire's dissolution in 1806, with only a brief interruption. With the formation of the Austrian Empire in 1804, Vienna became the capital of it and all its successor states.

Throughout the modern era, Vienna has been among the largest German-speaking cities in the world. It was the largest in the 18th and 19th centuries, peaking at two million inhabitants before it was overtaken by Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations, OPEC and the OSCE. In 2001, the city center was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In July 2017, it was moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger.

Vienna is renowned for its rich musical heritage, having been home to many celebrated classical composers, including Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Haydn, Mahler, Mozart, Schoenberg, Schubert, Johann Strauss I, and Johann Strauss II. It played a pivotal role as a leading European music center, from the age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century. The city was home to the world's first psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The historic center of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque palaces and gardens, and the late-19th-century Ringstraße, which is lined with grand buildings, monuments and parks.

Vienna was known to the Romans as Vindobona, a borrowing of a Celtic toponym meaning either "white place" or "place of Vindos" (a personal name). This name disappeared from the record after the 6th century, occurring for the last time in Jordanes' Getica. The German name for the city, Wien – of which Vienna is a Latinized form – is unrelated, deriving from the River Wien (compare Steyr, Enns, and Krems, which all take their names from the rivers whose mouths they lie at). It occurs for the first time in the Salzburg Annals, which notes that a battle was fought at a place named Wenia in the year 881. The name may ultimately mean "forest river", from Celtic *Vedunia.

Bécs, the Hungarian name for Vienna (borrowed into Serbo-Croatian as Beč and into Ottoman Turkish as Beç), probably derives from a word meaning "kiln", and may date from a period in the 10th century when the region came under temporary Hungarian domination. In Romanian, the city is now called Viena, but the archaic names Beci and Beciu were used in chronicles. Romanian still has beci in use, a common noun meaning "cellar"; linguist Dan Alexe states both it and the aforementioned names of Vienna are believed to ultimately be derived from a word of the Turkic-speaking Avars, originally meaning "fortified place" or "treasury".

In Slovene, the city is called Dunaj, which in other Slavic languages denotes the River Danube.