Ostenfriedhof Dortmund

 Sometimes i get asked how i manage to find the Cemeteries that are shown in this blog. Some of these Cemeteries are so famous that further research about them is redundant (Like Highgate in London: It's clear that it is a good one. Or Pere la Chaise in Paris: Another obvious one.).

Every single Cemetery in Italy is worth a visit as long the belonging city is bigger than 30.000 people. That's a fact. The cemetery in Verona (population 264.000) is far more spectacular than the Cemetery in Hamburg (population 1.800.000) which has the biggest Parklike Cemetery in the world. But a big park does not make a great cemetery. It's (at least that's what i'm after) the statues and the sculptures. The Angels. The beauty. It's not the amount of Rhododendron.

But why the Ostenfriedhof Dortmund? Well, we were invited to attend a party in Dortmund anyway so i took the opportunity to visit a cemetery there as well.

First step is always Wikipedia. You'll get a decent list of cemeteries as long as the city you're planning to visit is big enough. Dortmund is fairly big (popolation ca. 580.000) so i was lucky this time and found the entry for the Ostenfriedhof Dortmund.  And since you always get coordinates for an entry like this you can check out the location on Google Earth. There you can find often pictures of the cemetery and get a feeling about the place. This time i was fairly confident that the Ostenfriedhof was worth a visit and i was quite right!

Sometimes the research about the visited Cemetery is not ended after the visit. This time i digged deeper than ususal and i learned a very interesting fact about this beautiful cemetery: Many sculptures there were made by Benno Elkan, a jewish artist born in Dortmund.

Sorry 'bout the massive amount of text this time, but i deemed it worthy...

The weather was a bit nasty, but raindrops are always rewarding...

Iron-wrought papaver. 

Wandelnde, 1904, Benno Elkan

Persephone, 1908, Benno Elkan

Persephone, 1908, Benno Elkan