The mystery of the ancient cemeteries, how could you miss them in Prague. Catholic, protestant, Jewish, come with us to see some of them.
4 HOUR TOUR
GUIDE and VEHICLE
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Video: Prague Ancient Cemeteries Tour

Vysehrad Cemetery
Vysehrad Cemetery is more than just a common, quiet cemetery. It is the final resting place for the Czech most honoured composers, artists, sculptors, writers, scientists and politicians. Beautifully decorated and arranged with great care and respect towards names like Alfons Mucha, Bedrich Smetana, Antonin Dvorak, it has become more of an art object itself.
Olsany Cemetery
Prague’s largest and most evocative burial place. It is the largest graveyard in Prague and in the Czech Republic, once laid out for as many as two million burials. The graveyard is particularly noted for its many remarkable Art Nouveau monuments with climbing ivy and clearly marked lanes, all of which resembles Pere Lachaise in Paris. The cemetery was created in 1680 for plague victims that needed to be buried quickly and soon after became the main cemetery for the city of Prague as bodies were not to be buried within the city limits and at the time Zizkov was outside of the limits. The cemetery is the final resting place of some famous inhabitants including Josef Lada and Jan Palach, plus some infamous ones such as Klement Gottwald.
The Olsany necropolis consists of twelve cemeteries, including, i.a., an Orthodox and a tiny Muslim section, the largest Jewish cemetery in the Czech Republic and military burial grounds. Among the thousands of military personnel buried at Olsany, there are Russian soldiers and officers from the Napoleonic Wars, members of the Czechoslovak Legion, Czechoslovak soldiers, officers and pilots who fought at the Eastern and Western Front and in North Africa during the Second World War as well as male and female members of the Soviet and Commonwealth, including British, Canadian, South African, Greek and Turkish Cypriot and Polish armed forces who died for the freedom of Czechoslovakia in 1944-1945, including POWs.
Based on a bilateral agreement, Czech authorities are responsible for the protection of Russian and Soviet military graves at the Czech territory, as the Russian Federation is responsible for protecting Czechoslovak war graves from both World Wars in Russia. The Commonwealth Prague War Cemetery, including 256 graves, was established under the terms of the 1949 War Graves Agreement between the UK and Czechoslovakia and is maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
Till this day there is evidence of 230,000 people buried, 65,000 grave sites, 200 chapel graves and six columbariums in Olsany Cemeteries.
Part of the movie Bad Company was filmed in Olsany Cemeteries.

Malostransky Cemetery
One of the most beautiful cemeteries in Prague, a Malostransky cemetery. It is kind of a Prague version of Paris’ Pere lachaise in addition to Slavin cemetery at Vysehrad. Established in 1680 as a plague cemetery and closed in 1884. It is truly an open-air gallery, a magic place full of old funeral sculptures. Among the tombstone authors, there are names of Czech artists of 19th century such as František Xaver Lederer, Vaclav Prachner, Josef Malinsky, Jan Ludvik Kranner or Josef and Emanuel Max. In addition, F.X.Dusek and Josefina Dusek, the hosts of W.A. Mozart in Prague, Mozart wrote a concert aria Bella mia fiamma, addio for Josefina Dusek are buried here as well as Krystof and Kilian Ignac Dienzenhofer, authors of many Prague barock churches and buildings.
Dablice Cemetery
It is a graveyard in Ďáblice municipal district, Prague. The cemetery was opened in 1914 and over 20,000 registered graves are located here. As well as single and family graves there are about 70 mass graves containing bodies of over 14,000 people in total.
Since 1943, Czech people executed by Nazis or killed while fighting Nazis were buried there; since 1945 executed Nazi criminals and since 1948 people who were executed or died in communist prisons. In 2014 the body of the killed priest P. Josef Toufar was identified and exhumed from one of the mass graves in the course of his beatification. There is serious intention to declare this part of the cemetery a national monument. This initiative is hampered by the objection that, apart from thousands of the victims of Nazism and hundreds of the victims of communism, the mass graves also contain thousands of bodies or body parts of unknown people who died in Prague hospitals and were subsequently used for pathological or academic autopsies.
Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, the wartime Czechoslovak heroes who murdered Nazi Reichsprotector Reinhard Heydrich, are buried in anonymous pits at Prague's Dablice cemetery, a year-long research has confirmed.
Paradoxically, the two paratroopers, along with their colleagues within the anti-Nazi resistance, who all finally committed suicide in a cache before the Gestapo could catch them alive, are buried in Dablice along with Karel Curda, a traitor who reported their cache to the Nazis.
High-ranking German and Czech pro-Nazi officials who were executed as war criminals after the war are also buried in Dablice, as well as victims of the Czechoslovak communist coup of 1948.
Apart from Kubis and Gabcik, a duo known under the codename Anthropoid, Dablice is also a burial place of Alfred Bartos, Josef Valcik and Jiri Potucek (paratroopers from the Silver A operation), Adolf Opalka (commander of the Out Distance paratrooper group), freedom fighter Vaclav Moravek and Marie Moravcova, who hid the paratroopers from the raging Gestapo.
Those buried along with them include Karl Hermann Frank, a Nazi leader who decided that the central Bohemian village of Lidice be razed to the ground in June 1942 in retaliation for the death of Heydrich, the Reichsprotector who planned the Czech nation's liquidation.

The New Jewish Cemetery
The New Jewish Cemetery is a preserved cultural monument as a whole ; due to its character, disposition and a hundred-year excellent administration supported by a considerable role the Hevra Kaddisha played in Prague's Jewish community. The Hevra Kaddisha saw to it that graves were established in cemetery lots both chronologically and in accordance with the family's wish and significance which played its natural and social roles even at the moment of death in the bourgeois society. The Hevra Kaddisha also saw to it that inscriptions on tombstones were truthful and testifying to the buried person's character.
Since its establishment in 1891, the cemetery has been surrounded by the wall protecting the space for some 100.000 graves, i. e. for about one century. There were also structures built in the building style that prevailed in Prague in those times - neo-Renaissance. It is the style of the funeral parlor with a respectable hall of prayer, and adjacent rooms needed for the ritual preparation of the burial ; as well as the administration building including the cemetery caretaker's office and his and gravediggers' apartments, and other structures such as a storehouse of wood used to make coffins. Since the very beginning, the cemetery has been properly divided in lots which were gradually used as graves ; and a walk around the cemetery also gives an idea of the styles in which the tombs were built. The cemetery is situated on a hill sloped from the north down to the south and from the west down to the east, in a basin in its southeastern part where a columbary with its own funeral parlor was added in the 20s. Originally, it was completely separated and now it is connected with the main cemetery by means of passageways. The division of the cemetery suggested a significant architecture of tombstones for the graves situated at the corner of individual lots as well as the graves situated near main alleys - particularly in the alley were a burial procession walked from the funeral parlor down to the grave. The New Jewish Cemetery which will never be completely filled with graves because the devastating blast of Nazism exterminated those who could and should have rested here one day, is a homogenous architectural monument.


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