Windows For Peace

Peace Museum Vienna is down Blutgasse, a crooked, dead-end street in the historic city center, one of the oldest streets in Vienna. Their mission is both vital and challenging: to further world peace through educating the public. They may be small, but they have a strategy to tackle this mighty cause.

The museum hosts regular exhibits, holds discussion events, and makes their library free for all. But their most distinctive feature is “Windows for Peace,” the world’s only peace-themed street museum. As an outdoor public exhibit, it’s “open” 24 hours a day, with no cost of admission. Visitors can stroll from street to street, window to window (the display spans several blocks) learning about the lives and impact of the museum’s “Peace Heroes.”

These include iconic figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, but they are alongside others who deserve to be reclaimed from history — like Bertha von Suttner, the Viennese author of the novel, Lay Down Your Arms. The first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, von Suttner was the Museum’s first chosen Peace Hero.

Windows for Peace shares pictures, quotes, and biographies of these international Peace Heroes, and they encourage others to use their own windows to support the cause: to “help change the world into a better, more peaceful place, one window at a time.”