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| some Soviet officer graves |
Today was one of our more serious days as far as site seeing
goes. Our first stop was the Central Cemetery of Vienna. It has over 330,000
graves, and has burial grounds for multiple religions including Buddhism,
Protestantism, Judaism, etc. When you go in the main entrance, the first graves
you see are extremely elaborate. Our professor referred to them as the “V.I.P.
section”. Once you walk past these graves there is a Catholic Church that looks
really big from the outside, but doesn’t feel that large once you are in it.
Once you pass the church you get to a gravesite where only Soviet officers were
buried. It was really eye opening to see a site with so many graves all of
which belong to just officers and to realize that there were an incredible
amount of soldiers under the command of these officers. It can be difficult to
wrap your mind around the idea that millions of people were killed in the
Holocaust or that hundreds of thousands of soldiers die in battle, but when you
have a visual it can help. I don’t know specifically how many soldiers died
under command of these officers but I can imagine it was a huge number. When we
left the graves of the Soviet officers we went to a section that was designated
to composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, and Brahms. Mozart and
Beethoven weren’t actually buried there since they died before the Central
Cemetery was designed but there were memorials there for them. Once we left the
main part of the cemetery we went to the Jewish section of the graveyard that
has been abandoned. There are headstones that have ivy growing on them,
headstones are falling apart, there is also a pile of headstones that were
damaged during bombing and were just left in a pile for plants to grow over.
Central Cemetery filled up by 1920 and a new Jewish graveyard was added on a
few miles away and that’s where our next stop was. All of the headstones here
were a lot more modern looking but unfortunately it had a lot of headstones
that had plants growing on them.
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| Beethoven's memorial |
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| Jewish headstones damaged in bombings |
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| View from the Reisengrad |
Once we had finished with the graveyards we went to ride on
the Reisengrad, which is a giant Ferris Wheel with train cars. This was a very
cool experience because we got to see an aerial view of Vienna. I enjoyed going
up in the tower in Berlin better because we had been to a lot more places and
could pick them out from up in the tower, but it was still really interesting
to get an aerial view. It was also interesting because in one of the movies we
had to watch for the class we saw the Reisengrad, so it was cool to get to go
up in it.
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