🇦🇹 Vienna

The Iranian community in Vienna has deep roots. Austria has had diplomatic and cultural ties with Iran across a long history, and that connection is still perceptible in the city. Iranians in Vienna are active in medicine, in academia and in business. The community is smaller than London's or Stockholm's, and partly for that reason it is sometimes closer and warmer.

Vienna's beauty is of a very particular kind: palaces, museums, hundred-year-old cafes. The city is proud of its traditions, and that pride sometimes means resistance to change. For an Iranian immigrant who also comes from an ancient civilisation, that pride can be common ground and it can be a wall you cannot make yourself heard through.

Austrians are warm, but their warmth takes time. Gemütlichkeit, the cosy ease you feel in the cafes and at festivals, looks lovely from outside and is hard to get inside of. Your neighbour may take a few years to learn your name. That initial coolness should not be mistaken for hostility, though understanding it is not much easier.

Austria is often seen in Germany's shadow, and it differs from it in important cultural and administrative ways. Austrian bureaucracy has its own reputation. Without being registered in Vienna, working, renting a flat, even opening a bank account can become significant expeditions. The Meldezettel, the address registration, is the first step, and only the first.

Austrian politics has shifted rightwards in recent years, and that has changed the public atmosphere around immigrants. It is not something you can simply ignore. Periodic news about stricter immigration policy can produce a sense of insecurity, even in people who have lived here for years.

Austrian health insurance, the Krankenversicherung, provides good coverage inside a complicated system. Which specialist you can see, what you pay, which documents you need: each is a question that takes time and energy to answer. When your German is not yet strong enough, that complexity multiplies.

Iranian students at Vienna's universities, TU Wien, the University of Vienna, MedUni, are among the largest groups of international students. That student population has created an infrastructure of solidarity and networking. Student life does not last forever, and after graduation the larger questions arrive: do I stay, where do I work, do I become Austrian?

Working in German inside an Austrian environment has its own difficulty. The Austrian dialect differs from standard German: colloquialisms, local expressions, jokes you do not catch. The feeling of sharing a language but not quite can be more tiring than not understanding at all.

Homesickness in Vienna has a particular colour. Walking through one of the most beautiful cities in the world without your roots in it, with the cafes and the museums but not the family room that smelled of saffron, you understand that home is something other than a geography.