German tourist returns stolen skull to Vienna cathedral after 60 years with a final confession

Representative Image (AI-generated) For around six decades, a human skull taken from the catacombs beneath Vienna's St. Stephen's Cathedral remained far from its original resting place. The skull had reportedly been stolen by a young German tourist during a visit to the cathedral's underground burial chambers and kept for much of his life. Then, near the end of his life, the man decided to return it. According to a report by the Austrian newspaper Krone, the skull unexpectedly arrived back at St. Stephen's Cathedral in a parcel, accompanied by a letter from an elderly man in northern Germany. In the letter, he confessed that he had taken the skull as a young tourist around 60 years earlier and said that, as his life was drawing to a close, he wanted to make peace with himself. The extraordinary return brought an end to a story that had apparently begun with an act of youthful recklessness and concluded decades later with an attempt at remorse and restitution.An unexpected packageThe unusual discovery began when Franz Zehetner, an official associated with St. Stephen's Cathedral, found a large, tied parcel on his desk without a specific sender. What appeared at first to be an ordina...