František Xaver Sander – architect, civil engineer, builder, and professor at the School of Industry in Smíchov – designed this simple grave marker for his mother, but he is buried here as well. Of the many activities of this graduate of Prague’s technical school, the most significant was his work on the channelization of the Vltava and Elbe rivers in Bohemia. Before the First World War and in the interwar era, he primarily created hydraulic structures with a romantic or even fairy-tale appearance done in the Art Nouveau and modernist styles. His studio produced a remarkable number of works, including a set of locks at Hořín, a steel truss bridge at Roudnice nad Labem, a hydropower plant on the Elbe in Hradec Králové (Hučák), the Hradec Králové power plant on the Orlice River, a nearby Art Nouveau bridge across Piletický Creek, a power plant on the Vltava at Miřejovice, a reinforced concrete water tower in Pardubice, a reinforced concrete girder highway bridge across the Jizera River in Sojovice, office buildings and warehouses at the port in Holešovice, and the locks and lockmaster’s house at Štvanice Island in Prague. He also came up with an extravagant design for a hydroelectric plant at Štvanice in the shape of a paddle steamer, but it was rejected by the city. Sander’s perhaps best known work in Prague is his architectural rendering of the tip of Dětský ostrov (Children’s Island), which included changes to the island’s embankment, a circular pavilion, and a sculptural allegory of the Vltava and its tributaries by Josef Václav Pekárek. 

The Sander family’s grave marker consists of a light granite plinth on top of which sits a dark granite slab with the name and date of death of Sander’s mother. The inscription was flanked by four ornaments in the style of geometric Art Nouveau. The plinth originally bore two metal plaques with the names of the deceased, but only one plaque remains, dedicated to “prof. Ing. architect František Sander, chief of the building department.” The rectangular pillar in front of the plinth originally bore a metal lantern. As part the grave’s renovation in 2025, a new metal lamp was placed on a low stone plinth near the front of the grave bed. The grave is bounded by a black metal border; a bridge-shaped metal band at the center of the grave bed recalls Sander’s hydraulic architecture. The two upper pieces of Art Nouveau décor on the stele were covered with metal elements.

Sander designed several other monuments at Olšany as well. One example is a crypt for the Havlíček family realized by the stonemason K. Holub (V, 25, 29a). With a fairy-tale atmosphere influenced by the so-called “Peasant Baroque,” this exceptional monument holds its own against Sander’s better known works. Sander also designed a crypt (V, 10, 24) for Eduard Černý (†1915), director of the School of Industry, but no records exist of its appearance. Another impressive design (for the Coufal family) is known only from the collections of the National Technical Museum, and there is no evidence that it was ever realized. For this monument, Sander envisioned a light stone stele adorned with a shallow mosaic-covered aedicula, topped by a low triangular gable and flanked by wings with a gilded Art Nouveau décor.