This one is a follow-up to a series I did last year about the (in)famous Hill of Crosses in Lithuania. You can read it here. To be honest, not much has changed since then. I guess the hill grew a little bit, and there are some more crosses now, as they seem to multiply at a daily rate. It remains a mysterious place, strangely alluring yet somewhat creepy. It makes for interesting pictures, that’s for sure.
Traditionally, the Viennese have a somewhat morbid relationship to death. In the second half of the 19th century, when Vienna was an international metropole, a “high culture” of dying emerged. Suddenly, it became popular to have big funerals and fancy gravestones. We say “A schöne laich,” a beautiful corpse in Vienna. In this vain 1874, a new cemetery was built in the south of the city, so large indeed that it would accommodate the next few generations of Viennese. It still does its job very well due to the sheer size of the area, which is as large as the whole old town of Vienna (there is even a graveyard bus line). But it is not the scope that makes it so fascinating, but the gloomy atmosphere and the beautiful work of art done here. It is a monument to the past days of Vienna. The imperial town has a special relationship to dying.
Part I was shot at the old Jewish part of the cemetery.
Michael Hoffman Photography 