Fürstengruft cemetery and Free Garde Tour

This turned out to be an afternoon of cemeteries. I was walking near the Park on the Ilm and I happened to notice this gate.



Upon entering I noticed that it was a cemetery to the Slavic people who died fighting fascism. Obviously from the symbols it is from the Communist era.

The tombstones were all labeled in Cyrillic.

It turned out there was a garden tour that day (Private people were opening their gardens to the public.) I only encountered one before the time period was over (and it was the garden next to the Lizst house) but it was nice to have achance to see what this private garden looked like.

This is the Fürstengruft.

There was quite a lot of scaffolding and digging going on around it, so I didn't really go into the structure, but I did "borrow" some images from the internet, so you could see the important things inside.

These are the tombs of the "princes".

The most important are of course....

Of course the casket doesn't really have the body of Schiller. Schiller was disposed of in a pauper's mass grave and recently they did a dna test on the skull in this casket and discovered that it was not connected to his successors.

The cemetery had some lovely monuments and I was there at dusk, so it was full of atmosphere.

I could just imagine that lone zombie man from Night of the Living Dead, ambling across the green.

I thought this was a lovely grave stone.

I went inside this onion tomb tomb. There was some kind of religious woman inside collecting donations. I've forgotten exactly to whom this mausoleum was dedicated.

This person was clearly a musician.

It was a very peaceful place - just what I needed after such a busy day.