Town Cemetery

The central cemetery, which was built in 1891, is situated away from the town centre. The author of the project was the town architect Eduard Labitzký. The former town cemeteries were established near significant churches (Church of the Holy Spirit, St. Adalbert’s Church, or the former St. Linhard’s Church in today’s Hradecká Street). The largest and most important cemetery was near the parish church of Assumption of Virgin Mary in the place of today’s Silesian Theatre. Smaller cemeteries were situated by the suburban churches of St. Catherine and Holy Trinity. In 1789 Joseph II issued a decree that banned burials within the town walls. The largest cemetery in Opava was then relocated to the suburbs Jaktař between the streets Hany Kvapilové and Bochenkova in the place of today’s St. Hedwig’s Church where it stayed for about a hundred years before the current cemetery opened in Otická Street.

The new cemetery in Otická Street was built by the Municipal Building Authority led by the head engineer Emil Lubich von Milovan together with Opava construction companies (e.g. Kern & Blum) in the years 1890–1891. The project divided the cemetery into three separate parts: Evangelical on the left, Jewish on the right with a funeral parlour, and Catholic in the centre. The cemetery was segmented by a network of paths into rectangular fields with an oval square in the middle. There are two almost identical buildings on the opposite sides of a monumental entry built in the Transalpine Renaissance style with the motive of exposed brick wall. Behind the entry there are two more buildings with a simple colonnade. In the middle of the cemetery a quarter-circle Neo-Renaissance colonnade with Tuscan pillars serves as the last resting place for the most prominent townspeople, e.g. Emil Rochowanski, the mayor of Opava at the turn of the 20th century, or Jindřich Janotta, a sugar factory owner and politician. Originally there were supposed to be two colonnades, but the plans changed and in the place of the other colonnade stands the grave of the poet Petr Bezruč. The grave was made in 1965 by the sculptor Vladimír Navrátil according to a design by the architect František Novák.

Graves of other prominent persons are situated in various locations of the cemetery. These are often costly and opulent tombs, such as the grave of Carl Dorasil, the President of the Chamber of  Business and Commerce, doctor Jan Kolofík, naturalist Emanuel Urban, architect Adalbert Bartl, mayor Walter Kudlich, or Austrian field marshal Eduard von Böhm-Ermoll. Worth mentioning is also the Grauers family mausoleum, which is a marble Gothic chapel with stained glass by Józef Mehoffer, or the gravestone of doctor Kalus with a relief portraying a doctor treating a child by the sculptor Jaroslava Lukešová.

One of the gravestones relocated from the former Opava cemetery is a memorial of the fallen in the Austro-Prussian War in 1866. The monument has not been preserved. The World War I memorial by the sculptor Josef Obeth in the symbolic form of a sword thrust into the ground can be seen in the rear part of the cemetery. There are also over three thousand soldiers of the Red Army buried in the cemetery with list of the soldiers’ names on a memorial. Wehrmacht soldiers as well as deserters from the German Army have also found their last resting place in the Opava cemetery.

In the first half of the 20th century the cemetery expanded several times. In the 1980s a meadow for scattering the ashes was established. In 2007 a new funeral parlour was built in the place of the former Evangelical section of the cemetery. In the following years the paths were reinforced and new greenery was planted in the cemetery.