Vyšehrad Cemetery and the Slavín Tomb

Historic · Vyšehrad (Prague 2)Prague,Czechia

A small walled plot above the Vltava holding six hundred Czech artists and scientists, made into a national pantheon by patriots in the 1860s.

The Vyšehrad Cemetery is a small walled plot beside the basilica where about six hundred Czech artists, writers, scientists and musicians are buried, and you can cross it in ten minutes. Dvořák and Smetana are both here, and so are Mucha, Karel Čapek and Jan Neruda. The monuments were commissioned as sculpture rather than ordered from a mason's catalogue, which is why the place reads as an outdoor gallery of a century of Czech art. Walk to the eastern end and the ground stops at the Slavín, a communal tomb with a sarcophagus on it and a winged woman standing above. She is Genius Patriae, the spirit of the homeland, and the individual graves are arranged around her. None of this was planned. The plot was an ordinary parish burial ground until a group of patriots in the 1860s decided the nation needed a pantheon and set about making one out of it. You are standing in the result, and it is still filling up.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Start at the Slavín and work outward — the communal tomb at the eastern end is the reason the cemetery exists, and the individual graves make more sense once you have seen what they are arranged around.
Ten minutes end to end, an hour if you read — the ground is small, which is the point: a nation's chosen dead fitted into a space the size of a large garden rather than a landscaped park.
Note who is missing as well as who is here — this was a nineteenth-century decision about what counted as a national life, so it is full of composers and poets and thin on soldiers and politicians.
Burials still happen here — it is a working cemetery inside a fortress, not a monument, so a quiet visit and a wide berth around any gathering is the minimum.

Things to do

1
Read the Slavín's panels in order
Stand in front of the communal tomb and work along the names cut into it. The earliest are from the beginning of the twentieth century and the list has been added to ever since. Each entry was a committee's decision about who belonged in the nation's shared grave, which makes the panel a record of changing taste as much as of death.
2
Find two composers in five minutes
Dvořák and Smetana are both buried here, a short walk apart, with monuments commissioned as sculpture. Standing between them is a compressed lesson in why a small nation put musicians at the centre of its idea of itself, and why both graves still have fresh flowers on them on ordinary weekdays.
3
Walk the arcades slowly
Take the covered galleries along the north and west sides. These were the most sought-after burial places in the cemetery, so the carving is at its most ambitious here and the plaques are packed close together. It feels less like a cemetery corridor than like a wall of commissioned reliefs.