Park cemetery

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A park cemetery is a cemetery complex whose design is based on the concept of the English landscape garden .

execution

Name steles on a communal grave with anonymous burials in the Moordeich cemetery near Bremen

Elements of the park cemetery are an irregular route, designed hills and ponds and forest-like areas. The oldest park cemetery is Père Lachaise in Paris, which was laid out in 1804. Characteristic design elements were hills, valleys, flowing water and calm water.

The socio-economic development and the increasing distance of the population from the church have meant that fewer and fewer individual graves can be acquired and cared for by the bereaved. The municipalities have therefore switched to landscaping municipal cemeteries, which creates space for communal graves with so-called “anonymous burials” . The Moordeich cemetery in Stuhr near Bremen, opened in 1990, mirrors the character of the North German geest landscape with birch trees, wide meadows, an idyllic lake and a chapel behind an artificial earth wall with massive dyke gates as a "house behind the dike". This corresponds to a widespread need for closeness to nature, so that the cemetery becomes a place of reflection not only for the bereaved bereaved.

A forest cemetery differs in that the existing tree areas are poorly designed and hardly have any artificial interventions in the landscape.

history

In North America, the park cemeteries spread between 1830 and 1860. The Père Lachaise and English garden art served as their models. The first initiative of this kind on the North American continent began at the end of the 18th century when 31 families in New Haven bought an area outside the city at their own expense without church involvement in order to build a 2.4 hectare cemetery (Grove Street Cemetery). This area was later redesigned into a landscape park according to plans by Henry Dearborn and Alexander Wadsworth.

However, it was the rural cemetries that arose in the USA during the early 19th century , such as Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston , which was built in 1831 , which in turn served as a model for Europe. In England, John Claudius Loudon was one of the first gardening experts to advertise the new cemetery design concept, according to which they can also be used as freely accessible parks in the future. Even before 1850, cemeteries with park-like parts were laid out in Germany.

List of cemeteries

The list includes those systems that were planned and are designated as park cemeteries . The first facilities designed entirely as a park are the

Germany

Austria

Other countries

literature

  • Markwart Herzog , Norbert Fischer (editor): Nekropolis: The cemetery as a place of the dead and the living. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-17-018508-X .
  • Barbara Leisner: Aestheticization and Representation. The new park cemeteries at the end of the 19th century. In: Working group cemetery and memorial: Space for the dead. Braunschweig 2003, ISBN 3-87815-174-8 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ General information and photos on the Moordeich cemetery in Stuhr near Bremen , accessed on August 18, 2018