The stars in her hair

Number fifteen, the shop with the diamond stars in the window. They were designed here.

Alexander Emanuel Köchert was her court jeweller. He made twenty-seven of these stars for her, each one small enough to pin into her hair on its own, or clipped together into a tiara. In the Winterhalter portrait you saw at the start of this walk, nine of them are woven through her braids. That picture has been on biscuit tins, chocolate boxes and film posters ever since.

In June nineteen ninety-eight one of the original stars was on show at Schönbrunn in a high-security case, for the centenary of her death. A Canadian burglar lifted it out and left a replica in its place. For two weeks nobody noticed.

Nine years later he was arrested after a bank robbery in Canada, and the police found the star in a house in Winnipeg, carefully kept. He had never sold it. There is nowhere on earth to sell a star belonging to Sisi, which was exactly why he took it.

The original is in the Sisi Museum, back inside the palace we walked through. The copies in this window are simply for sale.

Walk up to Kärntner Straße and turn into Weihburggasse, back to where we started.