Lynched in the firelight of the Turkish siege
In the middle of the Turkish siege, an enraged mob in Vienna kills a teenager because of their clothing.
On 14 July 1683, the first day of the Second Turkish Siege of Vienna, a fire broke out in the Schottenstift monastery near the city wall. A strong wind drove the flames towards the neighbouring civic arsenal, where large quantities of gunpowder and weapons were stored. An explosion would have ended the defence of the city, encircled by the Ottomans, at a stroke. In the panic among the population, a rumour spread that Turkish spies or arsonists paid by the Ottomans were behind the fire.
A teenager of about 16 or 17 in women's clothing, who had been near the source of the fire, was seized and accused. Baron Zwifl, a well-known figure in the city who was considered harmless and is called Knifl in some sources, also became a target of the enraged crowd. Without any evidence, both were beaten to death by a furious mob. The blood-soaked bodies were dragged to the cemetery by St Peter's Church, where butchers' journeymen skinned them expertly to the cheers of onlookers. Only later did it emerge that a careless stable boy had started the fire by accident and that there was no connection whatsoever with the supposed arsonists.
The contemporary chronicler Johann Peter von Vaelckeren recorded the events in his siege diary, which explicitly describes the boy as having appeared in women's clothing. Historians and activists in the Austrian trans community today regard the case as the oldest documented murder of a gender-nonconforming person in Vienna. In 2003, on the 320th anniversary, the association TransX commemorated the fate of the nameless teenager with a week of remembrance and a funeral procession, drawing public attention for the first time to the ongoing violence against trans people, who to this day are victims of hate crimes around the world.