Open days at Prague cemeteries offer guided tours and gravedigger workshops
This weekend, Prague’s Cemetery and Funeral Services are opening their doors to the public for the first time, offering a unique opportunity to explore the city’s cemeteries and funeral facilities. The event will feature guided tours, workshops hosted by gravediggers and undertakers, and a chance to learn more about the often-overlooked world of funeral services. I discussed the details with the organization’s communication manager, Kateřina Pavlitová:
“The purpose of organizing this event was really to let the residents of Prague know that we exist. We are a fairly large organization, but we have been sort of invisible to the general public.
“So we decided that it was time to open up and let Praguers know that we're here, we provide a wide range of services for them and that we are a modern organisation that does interesting things. We also wanted to shine a spotlight on the people who work for us.
We try to make the program as varied as possible, so we have lots of guided tours of both the cemeteries and also of the Prague crematorium, the one in Strašnice, which happens to be the largest in Europe.
“We also have a grave digging workshop, which to many people sounded like it was a joke on our part, but we found that the public was massively interested. We also have an immensely popular night time tour of Olšany cemeteries and plenty of other things.
“I have to say a lot of the events that required a ticket of reservation are already fully booked, but there's still plenty that are open to the public.”
Given the response of the public, would you say the attitude of Czechs towards death and end of life rituals has changed in recent years?
“Well, that's a huge topic that I don't feel qualified to comment on, but certainly in the general public discourse, the theme of death doesn't seem to carry as much of a taboo as it did until recently. And we're trying to extend this conversation to end of life rituals and everything that comes after death.
“We're not here to illuminate the very important and profound subjects of mortality and the finality of human existence. But we think it's healthy to keep in mind that we are all going to die and to think about what happens after that and how we wish to be remembered, how we wish to be buried, what kind of statement or possibly lack of statements we want to make with how we leave this world.
“So I would say there's been a lot of interest in that, and we find that especially younger people are very much drawn to these subjects.”
Apart from the open days, there is also an open air exhibition on Mariánské náměstí called Transformations of the Prague Funeral Industry. What do you present at this exhibition?
“We try to make the exhibition as visually interesting to people as possible. It's a very wide ranging exhibit that tries to cover as much as possible in an engaging format. So it presents, of course, the history of the Prague Funeral Services, the history of the cemeteries, but also the contemporary aspects of cemetery culture of burial rituals of the services we provide. And we also show the people who work with us, people who work at the crematorium or who work in the cemeteries, to humanize our profession a little bit.”
More details about the open days at Prague cemeteries can be found at the website of the city’s Cemetery and Funeral Services hrbitovy.cz.
