Day 112: Hunting the Dead

More rain again today, but not nearly as steady. In the morning I decided to fulfil a promise I'd made and took the subway as far east as it goes (on the opposite side of the city from where I am) and then walked a few more kilometers to get to Zentralfriedhof, which is the largest cemetery in Vienna and one of the largest in the world. The part I was looking for was supposed to be pretty central, but I wasn't taking the main entrance in, and with the distances involved finding a central location wasn't trivial.




Eventually I was lucky enough to come across that universal savior to many a lost travaller - the Japanese tour group. I tucked in behind them and sure enough soon found my target - a special plot of graves and monuments for famous Austrians. The origin of the cemetery and the special plot are a bit interesting. In the mid-1800s the Austro-Hungarian empire was booming, and with the growing Vienna at its center the city was running out of room to bury people. In 1863 they set aside a huge parcel of land at the end of the city for a massive cemetery, and to give it some prestige they dug up and shipped in some famous corpses to class the place up. Then, of course, the empire collapsed after WW1 and the city never got as big as they expected, so there's still a lot of empty space.





After lunch I went back to the old city and visited the Alibertina Museum. It's famous for its print collection, and what I saw was nice, but it wasn't as enjoyable as the two galleries yesterday. I walked around a bit more but a lot was closed for Sunday and eventually headed back to the hostel early around 5pm to relax for the afternoon.