Tabor CemeteryPhoto: Fotosː BEV - Bundesamt für Eich- und Vermessungswesen / Bearbeitung (Stitch, Tonwertkorrektur)ː Christoph Waghubinger, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0. Cropped & resized.
In front of you stands a pale stone entrance with a square gate tower, a rounded Renaissance arch, and an inscription band above the portal that quietly announces its age.
This is Tabor Cemetery, the city’s great burial ground: about four hectares, around eight thousand five hundred graves, and several centuries of Steyr deciding where memory ought to live. The oldest part dates to fifteen eighty-four. That includes the Renaissance gate in front of you and an arcaded walk with eighty-four burial vaults. Together they form a Campo Santo... literally a “holy field,” laid out as a square cloistered cemetery. Efficient, solemn, and very Italian in concept. Death, apparently, also appreciates good geometry.
Steyr had tried other solutions first. The burial ground by the parish church overflowed during the plague of fifteen forty-one and fifteen forty-two. Then the city chose another site on Sierninger Street, and in fifteen sixty-nine that ground started sliding toward the defensive ditch. Not ideal for long-term residents. The city bought this site by fifteen seventy-two, but a destructive flood on the Enns and Steyr rivers swallowed the funds, so construction only began in fifteen eighty-three.
Even after the walls and gate stood finished, the cemetery remained unconsecrated during the Reformation and only received formal blessing in sixteen twenty-eight from Abbot Anton the Second of Garsten. Later centuries kept adding layers: a Jewish cemetery from eighteen seventy-four with one hundred forty-one graves, including a mass grave of more than one hundred Hungarian Jews murdered on a death march; a Protestant section separated by a wall from eighteen ninety-two; and military burial areas from the First World War onward.
If you check the app image of the arcades, you can see how richly decorated that Renaissance cloister really is. And if you glance at the before-and-after view, the gate tower looks reassuringly unchanged; the presentation around it is what has sharpened over time.
Inside the arcades, where the cemetery preserves 84 burial vaults and the richly decorated Renaissance-era cloistered walk.Photo: Isiwal, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped & resized.
This cemetery holds plague, reform, industry, war, and private grief inside one remarkably disciplined enclosure, and it is open daily from seven in the morning to eight in the evening.
Take a moment here, and when you’re ready, we can continue on to St. Michael.
4.8 across the App Store and Google Play. Here's a few we keep coming back to.
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This tour was such a great way to see the city. The stories were interesting without feeling too scripted, and I loved being able to explore at my own pace.
Started this tour with a croissant in one hand and zero expectations. The app just vibes with you, no pressure, just you, your headphones, and some cool stories.
