Prague’s “crazy cemetery” hides legends under the ivy

The immense “Cemetery of the Fools” of Pragueone of the scenarios of “Amadeus” masterpiece by Milos Forman, and visited by Margaret Thatcher, it remains a forgotten place away from the tourist circuits in Czech Republic.

The cemetery, far from the tourist routes of the Czech capital and its historic center – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – has about 4,200 graves.

This place, founded more than a century ago on the outskirts of the city to house deceased patients from the Bohnice psychiatric hospital, attracts ghost hunters, lovers of scandals and satanic rites who seek its magical energy and legends and mysteries. that surround him.

“It is a different cemetery” of the others, explains Jiri Vitek, a volunteer guardian of the place, former firefighter and now vice mayor of a Prague neighborhood.

“It was intended for classic psychiatric patients (schizophrenics, alcoholics), but also for people they do not want to come across (arsonists, pedophiles, murderers,” tells AFP.

Mozart’s funeral

The cemetery was opened and consecrated in September 1909.“Two days later, an eleven-year-old boy who died of tuberculosis became the first patient buried here,” declared Alzbeta Remrova, spokesperson for the Bohnice hospital.

At that time, the hospital looked like a village with a church, a laundry and a bakery, being the largest of its kind in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

“The patients worked in the fields, grew vegetables and worked in workshops”Remrova explained. The center’s staff could also be buried in the cemetery for free.

When the First World War broke out, Austrian soldiers admitted for mental illness and psychiatric patients from Italy, evacuated to Prague, were also buried.

Most died during a typhoid epidemic between 1916 and 1918, Vitek says. The cemetery closed in 1951, after which it was looted and neglected for six decades.

This extraordinary place was chosen by the American director Milos Forman, of Czech origin, to film the funeral of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for his film “Amadeus” (1984), partially filmed in Prague and winner of eight Oscars.

Thatcher’s pilot

Vitek says that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher visited the cemetery in 1990 to transport the remains of a British pilot killed at the end of World War II.

No one knew what the grave was, except for a local homeless man who identified it in exchange for a case of rum, Vitek adds.

However, most of the time the cemetery served as a test of bravery for the youth of the region, especially the southwestern part reserved for criminals. Some evoke a negative energy in that place, stating that it was colder than the rest of the cemetery.

“Non-believers were not buried in coffins, but in sacks, and they were sanitized with lime. “The hardened lime is what generates the cold,” he assures.

In the 1980s, police discovered a satanic ritual in the cemetery. Some more pragmatic Czechs used the place as a dumping ground. It was in this state that Jiri Vitek discovered him in 2011, when he was walking his dog.

“It was full of old refrigerators, washing machines, sofas and debris. So I started cleaning it.”, account. Little by little he organized guided tours of the cemetery, is working on writing a book and plans to renovate the chapel, covered in ivy, and the memorial.

“As a firefighter I saved living people for fifteen years. For 12 years, I have saved the dead,” it states.

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