A cemetery in Austria pays tribute to the lives lost in the Danube, encouraging us to remember those who left this world without a name
Author: Bartłomiej Krawczyk
The Viennese Friedhof der Namenlosen (Simmering district), i.e. the cemetery of the Nameless People, has the suggestive name of the cemetery of drowned people and suicides. This is the only place in Europe fully dedicated to the victims of the river. I had the opportunity to visit this small and hidden cemetery in the fall of 2021 and in the summer of 2024. Each time it makes an amazing impression.
Nameless people fished out of the Danube rest there: suicide floaters, drowned men and women, victims of mysterious murders, drowned children. People who, due to the refusal of the Catholic Church, could not be buried in Vienna's Catholic cemeteries, including the largest Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof).
The old section of the cemetery was swallowed up by the surrounding coastal forest (478 people were buried there in simple wooden coffins in the years 1840–1900), and the new section contains a total of 104 people buried in the cemetery in the years 1900–1940 (61 bodies remain unidentified, 43 have been identified). Until 1939, the bodies were buried here by local gravedigger Josef Fuchs who took care of the cemetry until his death in 1996. The man tried to identify the bodies found in the river. Currently, his son has taken over the care of the cemetery.
Friedhof der Namenlosen is a mysterious, sad and moving place. The minimalism of this rather well-kept tiny cemetery is striking: simple, black, iron crosses with inscriptions such as: Woman, Man, Nameless (Namenlos), Unknown (Unbekannt); sometimes the date when the body was fished out of the Danube is given. Anonymous graves are often decorated with flowers, candles and various children's toys and stuffed animals, usually severely damaged by the inexorable tooth of time. On one of the children's graves there is information that 11-year-old Wilhelm Tohn was drowned by the murderer.
In the cemetery there is a rotunda-shaped chapel designed by Karl Franz Eder in 1935 and a gravedigger's house, where you can see a wooden children's coffin through the dirty glass. However, in 1939 (a year before the end of burials), grain silos were built near the cemetery. Friedhof der Namenlosen had a cameo appearance in the romantic drama "Before Sunrise" (1995) with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, which was filmed in Vienna. Its dark-romantic aura also attracted musicians, e.g. the Austrian industrial/darkwave duo L'Âme Immortelle dedicated their 2008 concept album "Namenlos" .
It is worth adding that in Antoninów near Warsaw there is a cemetery of the unknown dead, where poor, homeless and forgotten people are buried.
Author about himself: By passion, I can be described as a taphophile, i.e. a lover of old and forgotten cemeteries, cemetery photography and architecture, epitaphs, tombstone photographs and the history of the deaths of prominent people. Of course, such an activity can also be linked to urbex (urban exploration of abandoned places), which I have been practicing for several years.
Website of the Nameless Cemetery : http://friedhof-der-namenlosen.at/
