Zentralfriedhof Graz

The Graz Central Cemetery is the city’s largest cemetery. The Catholic church “Zum Heiligen Blut” owns the interdenominational municipal cemetery.

The total cemetery area is around 25 hectares in size, with over 6.5 kilometers of roads and over 30,000 buried souls. The cemetery is interdenominational, with an Old Catholic section, a Ukrainian section, and burial sites for World War I and World War II casualties.

“For more than a century, the cemetery, with its graves of people of various religions, worldviews, and nations, has been a reflection of Graz’s history.” Austria’s political changes, conflicts, upheavals, and wars have left their mark: erstwhile political opponents who battled each other with weapons are also buried here.”

In addition to the axially located memorial for “soldiers and citizens of the former Soviet Union who died as a result of the effects,” there is a “international memorial redesigned in 1961 in memory of the political victims of fascism in the years 1938 to 1945” in the southeast. It comprises of a 20-metre-high rectangular stele and a 20-metre-spanning bridge arch with a gas-fired sacrificial bowl affixed to the top. There are 400 urns of Nazi victims in an adjacent granite block. The names of 2510 executed people are inscribed in gold writing on the weather-protected underside of the bridge arch.”Boris Kobe (1905-1981), a well-known Slovenian architect, was taken to the Dachau camp just before the war’s conclusion and subsequently to the Überlingen-Aufkirch subcamp.

There has been an Islamic burial cemetery since 1995. In the northeast, a 150 m2 interdenominational ceremonial hall and another Muslim burial cemetery were erected in 2010.Numerous tombs honoring the city of Graz may be found in the cemetery, as well as several culturally and historically significant burial monuments by artists such as Hans Brandstetter, Wilhelm Gösser, and Richard Jakitsch.

The cemetery is located in Graz’s Gries neighborhood, between Triester Straße and Alte Poststraße, which had to be relocated due to construction. It was located on the outskirts of the city, not far from the Puntigam toll, prior to the construction of Greater Graz. The east access road is named Lauzilgasse after the architect. The urn cemetery Graz with the fire hall (crematorium) is located northwest of the Central Cemetery, separated only by Josef-Hyrtl-Gasse.

History

Carl Lauzil designed the main buildings in 1885, with a neo-Gothic brick façade, and they were completed in 1886. The architect Lauzil’s architectural idea was related with the spatial separation of contagious and non-infectious corpses. This division was regarded as an exceptional technical and sanitary solution at the time of construction. To allow surviving relatives of an infected body to say their final goodbyes in person, the separate funeral parlour was equipped with an open pathway that permitted a view of the particular corpse through windows with hermetically sealed mirrors. The first burial in Graz Central Cemetery occurred on February 1, 1896 (field 10b 5 1). Rudolf Wlasak, a 29-year-old metalworker, died during the construction of the Central Cemetery Church.

Following that, the municipal council of Graz sought the closure of the city’s religious cemeteries, which included the St. Leonhard Cemetery, the St. Peter municipal Cemetery, the Steinfeld Cemetery, and the Calvary Cemetery. According to the city council’s intentions, the Central Cemetery was to be Graz’s solitary burial ground, with an interdenominational character.The very contentious “Graz cemetery question” was eventually resolved in 1894 by the sale of the central cemetery to the Catholic city parish, after which the municipal government abandoned the church cemeteries.

In May 2009, a Catholic columbarium was built in the traditional crypt cades on the cemetery’s northern perimeter as an urn wall with colored glass modules. However, the open, listed foyer’s spatial and design shift is contentious because the ancient burials in the rear wall are no longer accessible.A few viewing openings in the urn wall fail to generate the expected “dialogue with the old stock,” which also contains a Frohlik family tomb with a sculptural sculpture by Hans Brandstetter.

Since 2009, there has also been a heavenly spiral, where urn interment of ashes in the cycle of nature are conceivable, and virtual candles can be lighted in remembrance of the departed for the first time in Austria.The architects Veronika Hofrichter-Ritter and Gernot Ritter created a new urn park with conical-arched, sloping walls on April 7, 2016.