Half the size of Zurich, twice as much fun – Vienna’s jest for the cemetery of three million, Beethoven and Schubert reburied among the honour graves’ pantheon.
At a glance
- Type
- Central cemetery
- Period
- 1874
- Style
- Historicist necropolis; Jugendstil church
- Location
- Simmering, Vienna, Austria
- Coordinates
- 48.1500, 16.4392
- Scale
- 2.5 km2; 330,000 graves; 3 million interred
Overview
Vienna’s Central Cemetery opened 1874 interconfessional by decree – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, later Muslim and Buddhist sections sharing the imperial plain. The Ehrengraber’s honour rows gathered music’s pantheon by reburial – Beethoven and Schubert moved in 1888, Brahms and the Strausses following – Mozart’s memorial standing for the lost grave. Hrdlicka’s gate and Wagner-school church crown the axis.
History
The schone Leich – the beautiful corpse – names Vienna’s funerary connoisseurship; the Funeral Museum’s sitting-up coffins and the 71 tram’s death-line lore feed the city’s gallows tenderness. The old Jewish section’s recovering wilderness holds Schnitzler’s and Friedell’s stones – memory’s repair ongoing.
Architecture and Design
Max Hegele’s Lueger church (1911) domes Jugendstil over the main axis – Otto Wagner’s school applied to eternity; arcaded crypts and the presidents’ vault order the republic’s protocol. Deer graze the meadow sections at dusk.
Cultural significance
The Zentralfriedhof is Vienna’s relationship with death made municipal – music’s pilgrimage rows and the city’s self-irony – Europe’s second-largest cemetery as Gesamtkunstwerk.
Visiting today
Gates daily; Gate 2 leads to the honour graves’ circuit. The funeral museum and falter’s deer complete the visit; All Saints’ candles flood the dusk.
Getting there
Tram 71 from Schwarzenbergplatz runs the storied line to the gates.
Sources and resources
Find it on the map
See this place and what’s around it →Record researched and written by Luigi De Marchi for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.
📷 Become a Cultural Heritage Online photographer
Share your photos of places: they stay published under your name as the author. The more they're seen, the more you get noticed — and soon a contest will reward the most appreciated photos.
Log in or sign up free to add a photoIs this page about you?
This page is read by travellers and heritage enthusiasts who find it on Google. Tell us how you are connected to this place and we will take it from there.