The Olšany Cemeteries are above all a place dedicated to the remembrance of our loved ones. At the same time, however, they are a quiet, green oasis with hundreds of mature trees, as well as an open-air museum capable of telling the stories of the people who are buried here. Perhaps even more grippingly, they also illustrate the history of art – of artistic movements and styles whose prominent as well as unjustly forgotten representatives designed not just palaces, theaters, and churches, but also (and just as passionately) crypts and grave monuments.

The location of what today is the largest cemetery in not just Prague but the entire Czech Republic was ordained by one of the last plague epidemics to sweep through Europe. The first cases of infection appeared in the spring of 1679 in Vienna – a city that, besides being the center of infection was also the seat of the monarchy of which the Czech lands were a part. The emperor initially sought refuge from the plague in Prague, but even this city was not safe. By the end of the year, it was necessary to decide where to build a cemetery to deal with the sad consequences of the disease: for hygienic reasons and due to a lack of capacity, it was no longer possible to perform burials in the city. The choice fell upon a remote location outside the city walls, located away from any main trading routes. Three of Prague’s towns chose to situate their plague cemeteries in the area of today’s Žižkov, which at the end of the seventeenth century was covered primarily in vineyards and pastures and the occasional farmstead. The Jewish community of Josefov built its plague cemetery on the site of today’s Žižkov Tower, the New Town chose an area near today’s Atrium Žižkov, and Prague’s Old Town opted for a site beyond the old village of Olšany. This decision was confirmed by the construction of the Chapel of Sts. Roche, Sebestian, and Rosalia (protectors against the plague), and it is from this site that the regular cemeteries founded after 1786 expanded in several stages until they reached today’s size of fifty hectares. Over the years, around two million people have been buried here.

Our aim is to situate selected works of funerary architecture from the past two centuries in the art-historical context, and in this way to help paint a more complete picture of architectural types while presenting the full breadth of the various artists’ and architects’ oeuvres.