1.Country house Stuhr, former mill house from 1752. 
   1797 extension to a classicist residential house by Axel Bundsen, today Katharinen- Hospice.

2. Neo-Gothic farm buildings from around 1820.

2a.Neo-Gothic coachman's house from around 1820, today information center.

3. Mummy grotto, romantic garden decoration from the time around 1800, with antique Phoenician sarcophagus from around 360 B.C.

4. Waterfall between the two ponds, created around 1800.

5. Memorial stone to the horticultural exhibition in July 1874.

6.Garden pavilion from the early 19th century.

7. Wrought-iron enclosure, partly from 1883.

8. Tomb of Söncke (died 1815) and Maria Ebbesen (died 1837), former owners of the paddock

Old Cemetery

9. Border with cyclopean masonry in the style of Greek antiquity.

10. Classicist chapel (1810-1813) by Axel Bundsen, which with its two double doors embodies the      
       idea of a doorway from this world to the next.

11. Neo-Gothic tomb with underground crypt of the Christiansen family, built in 1829 according to       the designs of the Prussian                  master builder Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

12. Numerous important tombs from the 19th century.

13. Soldiers' graves from the German-Danish wars (1848-1851, 1864) with tumulus, to the north the "Idstedt-Lion".

 Museumsberg

14. Nikolai School, neo-Gothic style, built in 1893/94 by the city building official Fielitz, today part of the municipal museum (Hans-Christiansen-House).

15. Municipal museum in the neo-renaissance style, built 1900-1903 according to plans by Mühlke and Eggert (Heinrich-Sauermann-House)

16. Mirror grotto from around 1820, underground octagonal central building.

17. Fjord hillside (natural monument) with historic serpentine path and remains of retaining walls from around 1816.

 

 

 

  

Old Cemetery with Capel

In the years 1810 to 1813 the first municipal cemetery in the North was built on the Western Heights in Flensburg according to the plans of the architect Axel Bundsen (1768 - 1832). At that time, it was still outside the city gates, in the immediate vicinity of the English landscape gardens of the merchant Peter Clausen Stuhr (died 1820) and the merchants Andreas Christiansen sen. (1743 - 1811) and junior (1780 - 1831).

The Old Cemetery, which has remained almost unchanged to this day, is one of the most important monuments of classicism in Schleswig-Holstein.

 

Idea of a communal burial place - implementation of a world view

 

Until the 18th century, it was customary to bury the dead in inner-city graveyards right next to the church. But with the growing number of inhabitants, which had more than doubled in Flensburg in the 18th century, the need for burial places also grew.

 

The churchyards were hopelessly overcrowded and, in the context of the Enlightenment with its new ideas of health and hygiene, the relocation of the cemeteries outside the city gates was one of the most urgent postulates.

 

Death was now understood as a natural part of life and thus of nature itself. It was the transition to the infinity of nature and its creator.

 

The view of nature as God's creation puts free nature on an equal footing with the central space of the church. Only through this new relationship to death can the immediate vicinity of the cemetery and the gardens of Stuhr and Christiansen be explained.

 

Planning / Construction

 

Following a decree of the Danish king in 1807 to move the cemeteries to the outskirts of cities for hygienic reasons, corresponding ideas for Flensburg were taken up again. A commission, which included P. Stuhr and A. Christiansen Jr., dealt with the plans for an out-of-town cemetery, which received the full approval of the government.

 

In the end, the decision was made in favor of the uneven rampart area between Stuhr's and Christiansen's gardens.

 

Construction of the cemetery began in 1810. The architect Axel Bundsen, who had been trained in Copenhagen, was responsible for the overall management; the new cemetery was ceremonially inaugurated on 25th June 1813. The head gardener and warden of the new Flensburg cemetery was V. H. Munderloh, who was in charge of the cemetery from 1813 until his death in 1872.

 

The northern part of the cemetery and the southern end were designed as "garden sections", between which were the strictly geometrically arranged grave fields, around which wound a wide driveway.

 

In the east and north the cemetery was supported by a cyclopean wall based on ancient models.

 

Chapel

 

The chapel was built according to plans by Axel Bundsen at the northern end of the cemetery as a symbolic gateway from this world to the next.

 

On a square floor plan, Bundsen built a 1 ½ story central building with a dome and two single-story side extensions. In doing so, he combined architectural styles from Egypt, Greek antiquity and the Italian Renaissance in one building. By passing through the large entrance gate, one leaves the level of this world and is prepared by the funeral service in the chapel for the afterlife, which one subsequently enters when the rear gate is opened.

 

The benches for the mourners and the pulpit are arranged in a circle, which can be completely closed by two semi-circular sliding grids during the funeral service, thus symbolizing the ring of life. The stucco work in the chapel interior was made by the Tadei workshop and symbolizes the idea of rebirth.

 

The chapel is the only building in the cemetery and the core of the complex. All necessary functions, such as chapel room, mortuary, equipment room, carriage shed and apartment for the cemetery caretaker were combined here in one building.

 

Design - Ground plan

 

The Old Cemetery with its elongated drop-shaped ground plan has the outline of an ancient sarcophagus. In Flensburg we find the model only a few steps away in today's Christiansen Park. Here there is a grotto with an ancient human sarcophagus from around 400 B.C., which has this elongated drop shape.

 

The function of the cemetery is expressed by this layout. Due to this symbolic-aesthetic conception of the building, the Flensburg cemetery belongs to a series of rare and expressive revolutionary architectures that have their origin in France.

 

Tombs

Tombs reflect the social structure of a community; they show the personal fates and social conditions of the deceased, and bear witness to the way death and the dead were dealt with at different times - here in Flensburg from 1813 to 1953.

No other cemetery has preserved as many classicist and neo-gothic graves as the Old Cemetery. Particularly noteworthy are the cast-iron tomb of the Christiansen family from 1829, designed by the Berlin master builder K. F. Schinkel (1781 to 1841), or the burial plot from 1825 of the Görrissen family, with a sphinx that is said to have been made by the Berlin sculptor C. D. Rauch (1777 to 1857).

 

The graves in the southern part were raised around the middle of the 19th century and replaced by a military cemetery for the soldiers who died in the Schleswig Wars.