Cemeteries of Vienna: Photo Gallery

The photos of this gallery were taken on various cemeteries all over Vienna in 2007. I took them as illustrations when I wrote a story on the cemeteries of Vienna and the Austrian funeral culture for Spiegel, which took several of the pictures shown below and published them alongside with the text.

Cemetery means "Friedhof" in German. The main cemeteries where I took the pictures were the Friedhof Hietzing, a very exclusive place in the 13th district and preferred venue for being dead by Imperial nobility and aristocracy; the Friedhof St. Marx in Simmering, Vienna's only Biedermeier cemetery from the late 18th and very early 19th century - which is where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was buried in a muss grave.

The most important cemetery of Vienna is of course the Zentralfriedhof or Central Cemetery, the biggest cemetery of Europe and one of its most pompous. The Zentralfriedhof is packed with celebrity corpses (Beethoven, Schubert, Falco) and a real tourist attraction. The other ones are rather neglected by vast crowds, which makes them even more attractive in my opinion.