Altach Islamic Cemetery
The Islamic Cemetery Altach is a publicly administered cemetery for religious members of Islam in the Austrian state of Vorarlberg . The legal entity of the cemetery established in 2012 is the municipality of Altach , on whose municipality the cemetery area is also located. The Islamic Cemetery has space for 700 graves, with both single and double graves available.
In 2013, the Islamic Cemetery designed by the architect Bernardo Bader was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture , a major architecture prize.
history
The history of the Islamic cemetery in Altach began in 2003 when plans for an Islamic cemetery of their own in the state of Vorarlberg first emerged. At that time, Islam was already the second largest religious community in the state and made up around ten percent of the total population. In addition, around half of the Muslims in Vorarlberg were Austrian citizens, the majority of whom were of Turkish origin. Until then, most of the Muslims who died in Vorarlberg had been returned to Turkey or their respective country of origin after their death, in order to be buried there according to Islamic regulations.
After generations of former immigrant families lived in Vorarlberg at the beginning of the millennium, who were born and raised in Austria and whose connection to the country of origin of their parents or grandparents was rather loose, the country's Islamic communities founded the “Islamic Cemetery Initiative Group” in 2003. From 2003 to 2004, a study on the subject of “A burial place for Muslims in Vorarlberg” was carried out by Elisabeth Dörler on behalf of okay.z zusammen leben , an integration institution of the state of Vorarlberg.
In 2004 the initiative group finally submitted an application to the Vorarlberg state government for the construction of a cemetery . In the same year, the Vorarlberg community association joined the demand with the creation of a working group on the subject of “A burial place for Muslims in Vorarlberg”. As a result, a location for the cemetery with a planned capacity of 300 graves at that time was sought from 2006. On November 28, 2006, the Altach community council finally decided unanimously to sell a piece of land in the community area to the community association for the purpose of building a first Islamic cemetery in Vorarlberg, open to Muslims from all communities. In 2008, the 8,500 m² property was finally sold to the community association, which subsequently leased it to the “Islamic Cemetery Vorarlberg Association” founded by the Muslim communities of Vorarlberg. In 2010, however, the Altach community again took over the sponsorship of the cemetery, as the attempt to organize the construction project on the basis of a sponsoring association did not prove to be effective.
The architect Bernardo Bader, who was commissioned with the planning in September 2007 after an architectural competition was invited , worked out the detailed planning so that the construction of the cemetery could begin in 2009/10 and it could finally be opened on June 2, 2012. The Islamic Cemetery Altach is the second Islamic cemetery in Austria after the Islamic Cemetery in Vienna . In November 2017, a little more than five years after the cemetery opened, only 36 of the 700 possible grave sites, mainly children's graves, were occupied. Eva Grabherr from okay. Living together attributed this low workload to the strong ties to the homeland of the people who originally came to Vorarlberg as migrant workers. The occupancy rate of the cemetery then increased continuously: Until August 2019, only 74 of the total of 728 graves were occupied, but seven of them were occupied in the last month of the survey.
Design and architecture
The Islamic Cemetery in Altach essentially consists of four different parts: the grave fields , the farewell hall, the rooms for the ritual washing and a prayer room . The five grave fields are laid out next to each other in the shape of fingers and offer space for up to 700 graves, with single, double and children's graves being provided. All graves are laid out in such a way that the buried can be buried on the right side, facing Mecca, in accordance with Islamic regulations . The grave fields are separated from each other and from the surrounding area by a low network of wall panels. In the south, the grave fields are delimited by the other rooms in the form of a headboard as a kind of sixth finger.
This headboard is open to the grave fields and adorned on its outer boundary wall with an ornament of the motif of the Islamic octagonal star. The outer walls are made of reddish colored concrete. The part of the building that opens directly to the burial ground contains the farewell hall, in which there is also a fountain for the ritual ablution of prayer ( Wuḍūʾ ). The room for the ritual washing of corpses, which is primarily the duty of close relatives or Muslims assigned to do so, is located inside the building and has no direct external walls. The interior of the small prayer room on the east side of the building was designed by the Austrian artist Azra Akšamija. It is dominated by the Qibla wall, in front of which there is a metal curtain covered with traditional Vorarlberg wooden shingles , the so-called “shingle mihrab ”. At eye level with those praying in a kneeling prayer position, the shingles of the metal curtain form the words “Allah” and “Mohammed” in Kufic script . The prayer rug, which extends over the entire room, was hand-woven in a weaving mill in Sarajevo and its color gradient indicates the prayer rows.
literature
- Elisabeth Dörler : A burial place for Muslims in Vorarlberg . okay studies, No. 2, Dornbirn 2004.
Web links
- Information on the Altach Islamic Cemetery on the Altach community website.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Islamic cemetery of Altach awarded. In: vorarlberg.ORF.at . September 7, 2013, accessed November 23, 2017 .
- ↑ Information on the process of building the Altach Islamic Cemetery on okay-line.at , the website of okay.ziegen together.
- ↑ There is still a lot of space in the Islamic cemetery. In: vorarlberg.ORF.at . November 2, 2017. Retrieved November 23, 2017 .
- ^ Adrian Zerlauth: Islamic burials in Vorarlberg. In: Vorarlberg Online (VOL.at). August 18, 2019, accessed September 19, 2019 .
- ^ Brochure Islamic Cemetery Altach , published by the association okay.ziegen living together on the occasion of an exhibition at the Vorarlberg Architecture Institute in April 2013.
Coordinates: 47 ° 20 ′ 45 ″ N , 9 ° 39 ′ 50 ″ E