Vienna Central Cemetery

Vienna's Central Cemetery was planned for an empire that never arrived. In the 1860s the city fathers expected the capital of Austria-Hungary to reach four million people, and they set aside a vast flat tract in Simmering, far outside the town, big enough for generations of the dead. The Frankfurt landscape architects Karl Jonas Mylius and Alfred Friedrich Bluntschli won the design competition, and the cemetery opened on All Saints' Day 1874 — quietly, because the idea of burying all faiths in one ground had enraged conservative Catholics. Today it covers about 2.5 square kilometres, with some 330,000 graves and around three million people buried.

Distance made the new cemetery unpopular, so the city gave people a reason to come: honorary graves. Beethoven and Schubert were moved here in 1888, and Brahms, Johann Strauss II and Arnold Schoenberg lie in the same section, with a memorial to Mozart, who is buried in the nearby St Marx Cemetery. The architecture came next. Max Hegele won a competition in 1903 and built the monumental main gate, Gate 2, with its two funeral halls, the new arcades, and finally the domed Church of St Charles Borromeo from 1908 — one of the great Art Nouveau churches of Vienna, with the crypt of the Austrian presidents in front of it.

Beyond the honour graves the cemetery is a map of the city's communities. The old Jewish section, established in 1863 and damaged by the Nazis, still holds around 60,000 graves, among them those of the Rothschilds and Arthur Schnitzler; there are Protestant and Orthodox sections, a Coptic plot, and Europe's first Buddhist cemetery, consecrated around a stupa in 2005. Film lovers know it as the setting of Harry Lime's two funerals in The Third Man.

Getting there

The cemetery is in Simmering on the southern edge of Vienna, about 11 km from Vienna International Airport (VIE). Tram 71, the traditional route to the cemetery, runs from Schwarzenbergplatz to the gates; the Zentralfriedhof S-Bahn stop is near the old Jewish section, and U3 Simmering is about 2 km away. Bus 106 circles the grounds with numbered stops.