Fodor's Expert Review Stock-im-Eisen

Set into the building on the west side of Kärntner Strasse is one of the city's odder relics, an ancient tree trunk studded with blacksmiths' nails. Researchers in the 1970s identified the trunk as a 600-year-old spruce. Since the Middle Ages, any apprentice metalworker who came to Vienna to learn his trade hammered a nail into the trunk for good luck. During World War II, when there was talk of moving the relic to a museum in Munich, it mysteriously disappeared (and then reappeared perfectly preserved after the threat of removal had passed).