Skogskyrkogården

Skogskyrkogården, the Woodland Cemetery in the south of Stockholm, changed how the twentieth century thought about burial. In 1915 two young architects, Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, won an international competition with a scheme called "Tallum", and they built it over the following decades on old gravel pits grown over with pine. Instead of paths lined with monuments, they made a landscape: graves set quietly among the trees, open meadows, and buildings that appear one by one as you walk. It opened in 1920 and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994.

The approach is the lesson. From the colonnaded entrance the route divides, and a large granite cross stands against the open sky — an image the architects linked to the romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, while insisting it could be read by anyone, believer or not. Another path leads through a pastoral landscape with a pond to a tree-crowned hill for meditation. Ahead lies the Woodland Crematorium with its chapels of Faith, Hope and the Holy Cross, Asplund's last work, completed in 1940 just before his death and a key building of Nordic modernism.

Hidden in the forest are two smaller chapels that show how far the site travelled in style. Asplund's Woodland Chapel, from the early years, is a tiny building with a steep shingled roof on Tuscan columns, inspired by a garden hut he had seen in Denmark, with a gilded figure by Carl Milles on the roof. Lewerentz's Resurrection Chapel of 1925 stands at the end of a straight avenue through the pines, the Way of the Seven Wells, a restrained classical temple that you reach almost as a destination of pilgrimage.

With some 100,000 graves this is Sweden's largest cemetery by number of burials, and it remains a working place of mourning; Greta Garbo is among those buried here. An exhibition in the Tallum Pavilion explains the design and its architects. Walk it slowly and respectfully — the effect depends on silence, the seasons and the light through the pines.

Getting there

The cemetery lies in Gamla Enskede, about 4.5 km south of Södermalm in central Stockholm, and has its own metro station, Skogskyrkogården. Stockholm Bromma Airport (BMA) is about 13 km away.