Guided tour of the Old South Cemetery

Perhaps the most beautiful cemetery in Europe

450 years of history, cemetery culture and art history. The Old South Cemetery in Munich is considered one of the most important of all European cemeteries with around 18,000 graves and around 290 crypts! And it is the burial place of hundreds of well-known personalities who worked in or for Munich.

The Old South Cemetery and its history

The reputation of the "Outer Cemetery" was not exactly good when it was created outside the city gates in 1563. Not least because, as a plague cemetery, it had to keep the danger of the plague spreading outside the city. Since then, it has had an eventful but unique history; between 1789 and 1868 it was Munich's only cemetery. It was Elector Karl Theodor who strictly banned burials within the city walls, so that the previously rather unpopular "Outer Cemetery" suddenly became the "Central Cemetery". Now everyone was forced to bury their relatives here. Not only did five different "burial classes" testify to the different social status of the deceased, but also a style of gravestone art that began with Franz Schwanthaler at the beginning of the 19th century and which is unparalleled in art history today.

Precisely because the Old South Cemetery was the only cemetery in Munich for around 80 years, the “really big names” of citizens who left their mark in Munich, mainly in the 19th century, can be found here.

The “Who’s Who” of Munich

Personalities such as the sculptors Roman Anton Boos and Ludwig von Schwanthaler, painters such as Carl Theodor von Piloty (who painted the allegory Monachia for the large meeting room of Munich's New Town Hall) and Wilhelm von Kaulbach, the brewery dynasties Sedlmayr and Pschorr, the great architect of the late 19th century Gabriel von Seidl, but also his even greater predecessors and mutual arch-enemies Leo von Klenze and Friedrich von Gärtner are buried in the Old South Cemetery. Poets, thinkers, philosophers, inventors, musicians, entrepreneurs, politicians and actors are laid to rest here, the "WHO'S WHO" of Munich's great personalities. But it was not only men who contributed to Munich's greatness: Ellen Ammann, the women's rights activist and founder of the Catholic Women's Association, the "Beautiful Munich Girl" Helene Sedlmayr or the founder of the German Theater Museum Klara Ziegler. The list of well-known names could go on and on.

Funeral culture in Munich

On this tour you will learn more about the cemetery church of St. Stephan , the history of the cemetery, the cemetery and burial culture, and at selected gravesites you will hear stories and biographies of important Munich personalities. The cemetery has long since lost its "spooky character" and is one of the most beautiful green spaces in Munich.

We cordially invite you to join us on a stroll through the idyll of this extraordinary place.