Vyšehrad Cemetery & Slavín: Where the Nation Sleeps

Why is it significant?

Walk slowly between the graves. The arcades along the walls, the carved angels, the mosaics, the sculpted portraits... this is less a cemetery than an open-air gallery, and almost every name on the stones is one a Czech child learns at school.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk slowly between the graves. The arcades along the walls, the carved angels, the mosaics, the sculpted portraits... this is less a cemetery than an open-air gallery, and almost every name on the stones is one a Czech child learns at school.

In the 1860s, patriots of the national revival decided that the Czech nation needed a resting place for its greatest sons and daughters, a Pantheon under the open sky. The little parish graveyard of Vyšehrad, on the hill of legends, was the obvious choice. The writer Božena Němcová, whose novel The Grandmother every Czech knows, was already buried here, in 1862. The poet Jan Neruda followed, and the composer Bedřich Smetana in 1884.

Under the arcade lies Antonín Dvořák, who died in 1904, the composer of the New World Symphony, with a bust above his grave. Further on lies Karel Čapek, whose play R.U.R. gave the world the word robot, and who died on Christmas Day 1938, weeks after Munich had carved up his country. And near the basilica rises Slavín, the great common tomb crowned by a winged figure, built around 1890 and bearing the words: though they are dead, they still speak. More than fifty artists and scientists lie inside, among them the painter Alfons Mucha, who died in 1939, his health broken after interrogation by the Gestapo.

In 1939, under the occupation, the remains of the Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha were brought here from the Sudetenland, and his reburial turned into a silent demonstration of national feeling. Fifty years later, on 17 November 1989, the student march that ended in the beatings on Národní třída came first to this cemetery, to Mácha's grave, to light candles.

Smetana gave this hill its music, too: Vyšehrad is the first movement of his cycle My Country, opening with two harps, like a bard tuning up. By tradition, on 12 May, the anniversary of his death, the Prague Spring festival opens with the whole cycle. Now leave by the far gate and walk south through the park, past Myslbek's giant statues, to the edge of the cliff above the river.