Old Jewish Cemetery

Historic · Josefov (Old Town), Široká / U Starého hřbitovaPrague,Czechia

Twelve thousand leaning stones on half a hectare in Prague, the dead buried in up to ten layers because no more land could be bought.

The Old Jewish Cemetery holds more than twelve thousand stones on a plot barely half a hectare across, and the ground under them is made of graves. It is a mound rather than a flat field, rising well above the lane outside, with stones tilted at every angle and pushed against each other by the earth moving beneath them. Elder trees grow between them. You walk a fixed one-way path with a rope on either side, and you cannot leave the way you came in. Prague's Jews were forbidden to buy more land, so when the plot filled they buried again on top, and Jewish law does not allow an old grave to be disturbed, so nothing was ever cleared. Researchers count as many as ten layers in places. Rabbi Judah Loew, the scholar later linked to the golem, is here; he died in 1609. So are the astronomer and chronicler David Gans and Mordechai Maisel, the mayor of the Jewish town who paid for much of it. The last burial was in 1787.

Worth knowing

Good to know

You enter through a synagogue and leave at the far end — The route is one way with no doubling back, so look properly the first time you pass a stone rather than planning to return to it.
Men are given a head covering at the door and are expected to wear it — This is a burial ground rather than a monument, and the same rule applies to visitors as to mourners.
Read the carved symbols instead of the Hebrew — Two hands raised in blessing mark a priestly family, a jug marks a Levite, and scissors or a book tell you the trade the dead person lived by.
Come in the first hour — The path is narrow and roped, so a single tour group ahead of you sets the pace for the whole visit and there is no way to overtake.
Overcast days suit it better than bright ones — The stones are packed under trees, and hard sun throws leaf shadow across the carving that makes the inscriptions almost impossible to read.

Things to do

1
Look at the ground before you look at the stones
Stop just inside the entrance and compare the level of the burial ground with the lane you came from. It stands metres higher. Everything above the street line is made of graves and the earth carted in over them, and understanding that first changes how the rest of the visit reads.
2
Find Rabbi Loew's tomb and read the pebbles
His is a free-standing renaissance tomb rather than a slab, and it is the one place in the cemetery where the stones are covered in pebbles and folded paper notes. Look at what people have left rather than at the carving. He died in 1609, and the visiting has not stopped since.
3
Pick one stone and work out the trade
Choose a stone at random and look only at its carved symbols. Hands raised in blessing, a jug, a pair of scissors, a mortar: each names a family line or a livelihood. Doing this once turns a field of writing you cannot read into a list of people you can.