With Viennese restaurants serving as soup kitchens and emergency feeding stations, the city’s famed horse-drawn ‘fiakers’ have taken on a new role, too, delivering hot meals to the elderly and others most at risk to coronavirus.
Once they were Vienna’s taxi fleets, but in the motor age, they have survived as a familiar tourist attraction, providing a slow, colorful and expensive way to visit different parts of the city center.
But with tourism gone for the moment, the bowler-hatted drivers have found a way to do their part in the crisis, and also keep their horses in working trim. One driver told an Australian reporter that since “There are no tourists, there is no business at all, and therefore they’re all at home. But the horses still need to move around,”
The InterContinental Hotel has been delivering 250-300 meals a day as well as feeding night-shift medical staff at a nearby hospital. The fiaker drivers who have joined the effort are sharing the load with bicycle and car deliveries.
Photo: Túrelio/Wikivoyage
