Mainz Main Cemetery

The French prefect Jeanbon St. André had the cemetery laid out, at a time when it lay outside the city. It is regarded as a model for Père Lachaise in Paris. The ground had already been used for burials in Roman times, and a chapel stood here for a period in the Middle Ages.

The cemetery covers around 20 hectares and is divided into numbered fields. Its streets of family tombs, lined with vaults of leading Mainz families, give it its character. Between 1850 and 1879 the portal vaults were built, also called oven vaults for their shape: underground burial chambers that show only a barred portal above ground. More than 230 gravestones and monuments are listed, and the oldest surviving stone dates from 1805.

The composer Peter Cornelius, the prehistorian Ludwig Lindenschmit the Elder, the carnival performer Ernst Neger and the chemist Fritz Strassmann, co-discoverer of nuclear fission, are buried here. Several monuments commemorate French and Prussian soldiers and the victims of the 1857 powder tower explosion.

In 2005 the cemetery was added to a European list of significant cemeteries. A visit rewards you with funerary architecture, a park setting and a good deal of Mainz history.