Vienna's Stadtpark once housed turtles, flamingos—and even sheep

What started as a joke turned out to be true—turtles in the city park?

At first, the idea seemed absurd. Turtles in Vienna's Stadtpark—why would anyone seriously demand that? But what began as a lighthearted suggestion soon took on a surprising gravity. After this column ran, readers flooded in with emails, recalling a mid-20th-century Stadtpark that bore an uncanny resemblance to a small zoological garden. Beyond the peacock pair (whose mysterious disappearance we've already covered), there were flamingos, pelicans, sheep, rabbits—and yes, even turtles. Some even mentioned a terrarium. But was any of this real?

To find out, we went back to the beginning—that is, to Wiener Stadtgärten (MA 42), the city's parks department. When asked, officials stated they had no record of the park "deliberately keeping various animal species" there. If such a thing did exist, they added, it would have been "so long ago that no further details are available." Whether the 1950s qualify as the distant past is, of course, a matter of definition. Either way, the city's garden authorities could not confirm the turtles' existence.

Months of research—or just a few minutes?

The Vienna City and State Archives, on the other hand, offered reading suggestions and the chance to dig through their collections. The catch? Such an investigation, their spokesperson noted, would take "several weeks to months." That may be open to interpretation, but in the fast-paced world of daily journalism, it's an eternity.

So we turned to old newspapers. The sheep in Stadtpark were easy to verify—even a photo of flamingos (from 1966) surfaced in our archives. The turtles, however, proved more elusive. It wasn't until we searched ANNO, the Austrian National Library's digital reading room, that the evidence emerged. The Arbeiter-Zeitung reported on thirty turtles in a terrarium, while Neues Österreich described an aviary in 1955.

So, dear readers, your memories were spot-on—even if they hark back to what some might call the "distant past." But then again, that's all a matter of definition.