Season 3 Episode 8
The Grim is opening the gate to Mirogoj Cemetery in Zagreb, Croatia, which marks its 150th anniversary this month. Behind its long wall of arcades and green copper domes lie an estimated 322,000 people. On this episode, we trace Mirogoj from the debts of Ljudevit Gaj, the Croatian National Revival leader whose ruined estate became the city's burial ground, through architect Hermann Bollé's famous arcades and a century of war memorials, to the 2020 Zagreb earthquake that left the arcades fenced off and still awaiting restoration.
Along the way: the fencing teacher who became Mirogoj's first burial in 1876; a public cemetery statute that opened the grounds to every faith; a mortuary built on the site of Gaj's summer mansion; the poet Petar Preradović's reburial as a patriotic protest; the July Victims and the sleeping lion that followed them up the hill; a church crypt sold before the church was even built; the 1928 parliament shooting of Stjepan Radić; Plot 142, the small grave of hundreds of children from Kozara who reached Zagreb during World War II but did not survive; the Homeland War's Wall of Pain, its bricks buried in the ground; and the All Saints' Day sea of flames, when thousands of candles light the hill.
A gothic deep dive into Croatian history, Zagreb's grandest cemetery, and the dead it keeps, from The Grim.
