Zentralfriedhof

The Erlangen Central Cemetery stands on Brucker Anger, about one kilometre southwest of the city centre. It covers roughly 60 000 square metres and holds about 9 000 graves, making it the largest burial ground in the middle Franconian city. The cemetery was laid out in the 1890s when the old municipal burial ground near today’s Ehrenfriedhof could no longer cope with the growing population. Construction cost around 90 000 marks, and the new site opened to all denominations and to deceased patients from mental health and care institutions in 1895. The original wall enclosed only three sides of the plot. Between 1916 and 1921 the cemetery became the final resting place for Russian, Italian and French prisoners of war who had died in the local camp. The Italians and French were later taken home, but the Russian dead received a two-metre granite memorial with Cyrillic inscriptions in 1919. Their individual graves were gathered in 1929 and placed in two artificial-stone sarcophagi beside the memorial. The cemetery was expanded eastwards in 1927, southwards in 1944–45, and again eastwards in 1957. A flower kiosk opened in 1954, and a new columbarium was consecrated in 1998. Visitors enter through a sandstone gate built around 1895, topped by a cross and flanked by round pillars under a seashell gable. The west and south walls carry many memorial plaques and tombs from the same period. Inside, the mortuary chapel is a single-storey sandstone building with a pitched roof and a small bell tower. Its west front features arcades on round columns and a colonnade with Ionic capitals. Since 1994 the chapel has housed an organ by Deininger & Renner. Among the notable graves are those of professors from Friedrich-Alexander University and former mayors, alongside war graves from the Second World War.