Vienna’s Funeral Museum Rises Again

Vienna – Vienna’s morbid Funeral Museum is now closer to the action: the Austrian capital’s huge Central Cemetery. The opening is just in time for Halloween on Friday and the days of the dead on weekend.

It reopened this month and being updated for the digital age, in its new location at the Zentralfriedhof, the second-largest cemetery in Europe. But with some three million “inhabitants”, the graveyard is the biggest by number of interred, report said.

Museum director Helga Bock said the stepped entrance to the subterranean museum takes people literally down into the underworld of undertakers from centuries past, describing it as “into the realm of the dead.”

Report said some 250 items are on display, showing how for the Viennese having a good send-off—or as they say a “schoene Leich” or “beautiful corpse”—is important, no matter what the cost.

Bock added that for nobles, and especially the Imperial Court, funerals were opportunities to demonstrate power. And people adopted these customs, which is why Vienna developed such a specific mourning culture.

The many eerie items include death masks, death notices, and various coffins, report said. But among the more bizarre is a bell that was placed above ground, attached to the corpse by a string, to ring if you were buried alive by mistake—and a special “Herzstichmesser” knife to pierce the heart to make doubly sure you weren’t.

Another attraction is the reusable wooden coffin with a hinged door underneath instigated in 1784 by Emperor Joseph II in order to save money, but withdrawn a year later, report said.

In this new museum, visitors can no longer lie in a coffin—some even wanted the lid on—as they used to be able to do once a year during Vienna’s annual Museum Night, report said.

Bock said the management decided because it was totally inappropriate.

Source: GMA News Online

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