Vienna Central Cemetery | Beautiful corpse even during his lifetime

Vienna – the tram, as the streetcar is popularly called, takes you to the southeast of the city to its final stop: Gate 2 of the Central Cemetery. Outside the main entrance, the smell of hearty specialties wafts from the sausage stand. The cemetery café offers strudel with whipped cream. Horse-drawn carriages are waiting for a final tour of Europe's second-largest cemetery.

A city of the dead and the living – 2.5 square kilometers in size, with 330,000 graves spread across a labyrinthine park. Joggers do their laps, students visit memorials, some simply come to pause. The Central Cemetery is both a local recreation area and a place of remembrance.

Urban gardening in the cemetery

Julia Stering from Friedhöfe Wien GmbH leads a tour of the grounds. The employee points out an area behind rows of graves with beds sprouting lettuce, marigolds, and carrots: "There's urban gardening here. Those who already tend a grave were able to choose a bed and plant it."

Completely pesticide-free, as organic quality is mandatory on the 40 plots. The project brings people together – through gardening, through conversation, through reflection, says Stering. "We've made it our mission to bring people to the cemetery while they're still alive," she explains.

Indeed, the Viennese's relationship with death is deeply rooted in urban culture. The "Schöne Leich," the magnificent funeral with a six-horse carriage, professional eulogist, and funeral feast, the traditional post-funeral meal, is legendary.

But time doesn't stand still in cemeteries – this is reflected in the growing interest in alternative forms of burial. "The Vienna natural grave is a prime example of this," explains Stering. Until 2022, cremation was a prerequisite; now, "a completely biodegradable coffin without metal or synthetic additives" is sufficient. This initially caused a lot of uproar, but now demand is high.

The desire for individuality in death is also reflected in the growing interest in other forms of natural burial: The urns of the cremated are interred at the foot of selected trees or at the roots of shrubs. The names of the deceased can be engraved at a shared memorial site, thus eliminating the costs of grave design and maintenance.

The cemetery has become a place of opportunity, says Stering: "It's a mirror of society. Over many centuries, it has reflected what people desire. Anyone can be buried here – regardless of religion or denomination," Stering emphasizes. 13 to 15 burials take place daily at the Central Cemetery, with a particularly high number on Fridays and Saturdays.

On our walk, we meet Stefan Riedl. The historian takes us to one of the most prominent parts of the grounds: the more than 1,000 honorary graves. These are the resting places of greats such as Ludwig van Beethoven , Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, and Johann Strauss. But not all of them were buried here during their lifetime. Many celebrities, Riedl explains, were exhumed from other cemeteries and reburied in the Central Cemetery—a kind of posthumous VIP transfer.

Riedl knows them all – including the gruesome anecdotes. Beethoven is indeed buried in the Central Cemetery, but presumably with the strange skull that was found and packed away during his reburial in the honorary grave in the Währing local cemetery in 1888. In comparison, Johann Strauss's son, immortalized by the Blue Danube Waltz, was lucky: a grave robber supposedly only stole his dentures.

The gravestone of Udo Jürgens is a place of pilgrimage: The singer and entertainer, who died in 2014, lies beneath a six-ton ​​marble piano – designed as a shroud . The three-part gravestone of Hans Hölzl, aka Falco, is also sparkling and extraordinary: a roughly three-meter-high red obelisk symbolizing fame, a Plexiglas panel in the shape of a CD containing his albums – and a broken stele representing transience. "One of the most visited graves in Vienna's Central Cemetery," Riedl reports.

Rescue alarm against apparent death

"In Vienna, you have to die first before they celebrate you. But then you'll live long." Helmut Qualtinger knew from his own experience how true this, his own quip, was. During his lifetime, Vienna's great satirist and actor was both admired and reviled, especially for his critical, often bitterly satirical texts that exposed post-war Austrian society, its opportunism, its repression of the Nazi past, and its petty-bourgeois mentality.

Qualtinger didn't want an honorary grave, but he is buried in exactly that. Whether because of his writings or his membership in the Association for Vertical Burial – a not entirely serious initiative that promoted space-saving, vertical burials – Stefan Riedl is unable to determine.

This bizarre idea to save space failed to gain traction, just like Joseph's economy coffin. In 1784, Emperor Joseph II decreed the reusable coffin with a hatch on the bottom, through which the dead could be transported to the grave—and which was intended to be used multiple times. But as ingenious as the invention was, the Viennese people rejected it outright, venting their outrage in protest marches and forcing the emperor to rescind his decree.

Another curiosity: the so-called rescue alarm clock from the 19th century. To detect apparent death, the deceased were laid out for 48 hours. The bodies were connected with a cord that led to an alarm clock—usually in the gravedigger's apartment—to sound the alarm in the unlikely event of a return to life. "But there's no evidence that anyone was ever rescued," says Riedl. "But it did provide peace of mind."

The Central Cemetery is valued as Vienna's cultural heritage not only because of the life-saving alarm clock—even though neither is yet on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Those of the largely Christian Orthodox Roma community are particularly special. Many of these graves were planned and designed during the victims' lifetimes.

Riedl recalls a tour: "In front of one of these graves, there was a table full of food. Family and friends celebrated with the deceased, symbolically placing a plate on the grave. Anyone passing by was invited to join in." This is a very unique, very lively culture of mourning. "It's almost rude to say no."

"We have made it our mission to bring people to the cemetery while they are still alive."

Julia Stering Cemeteries Vienna GmbH

Today, the Central Cemetery is one of Vienna's most famous sites, a tourist hotspot—and at the same time a memorial and monument to Nazi victims, concentration camp prisoners, resistance fighters, and the murdered children of Spiegelgrund. "It was a so-called medical institution of the National Socialists." Sick, disabled, and so-called ignoble children were admitted there. Inhumane medical experiments were conducted on them. "Many of the murdered victims were younger than three years old."

Black humor for farewell

Meanwhile, the gravestones cast long shadows against the setting sun – on this late afternoon. Stefan Riedl recommends a final stop at the cemetery shop to meet the Grim Reaper with a smile.

There, you'll find devotional items with a dark sense of humor: an ice scraper with the inscription "With us, you'll scrape better," and a T-shirt that reads "Vienna Cemeteries – you've come to the right place!" Originally, Bestattung Wien distributed candy and pens as promotional gifts, primarily to retirement and nursing homes. Demand soon became so high that they switched to professional merchandising.

Vienna's Central Cemetery is more than a place of final rest. It is a mirror of society, a place of history, farewell, encounter – and a place where death loses its terror. With a smile, with tears, with a poem – or with a garden spade. In true Viennese style – and sometimes with style.