Private Melaten Cemetery Guided Tour in German Cologne

Melaten Cemetery and why it stands here

Melaten lies on the old road from Cologne to Aachen, in the Lindenthal district west of the centre, and its name recalls the leper hospital that stood here from the twelfth century, far enough from the city walls to keep the sick apart. For centuries this was also the place where criminals were executed. When burials inside the city were forbidden under French rule in 1804, the city needed a new cemetery outside the walls and chose this ground; Melaten was consecrated in 1810 and has grown into a park of about forty hectares with some fifty-five thousand graves.

Your private guide begins the Melaten tour at Gate II, the old main entrance, with this story, and because the group is yours alone you can ask as much as you like. If you have wondered whether Melaten Cemetery is worth visiting, the first minutes on the central avenue usually settle the question.

The central avenue of Melaten

From the old main entrance a straight avenue runs through the heart of the cemetery, lined with the grandest tombs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is where Cologne's bankers, manufacturers, publishers and merchant families built chapels, temples and pavilions in granite and marble, with bronze angels, mourning figures and portrait busts, and where the local nickname Millionaires' Avenue was born. Walking it, you follow the rise of the city in the industrial age and the fashions of grief, from strict classical forms to flowing Art Nouveau.

On this private Melaten Cemetery tour the guide stops where you want to stop: at a tomb with a surprising inscription, a grave decorated in the colours of the Cologne carnival, or a modest stone with an unusual story. The avenue and its side lanes take about forty-five minutes of the two hours.

The chapel of St. Mary Magdalene and Lazarus

A short walk from the avenue stands the small chapel of St. Mary Magdalene and Lazarus, the only building that survives from the medieval leper hospital. Rebuilt in the thirteenth century and dedicated to saints associated with the sick, it is the oldest structure on the grounds and is still used for funeral services. The plot around it is where the lepers and later the first citizens of the new cemetery were buried, so the ground here is the oldest consecrated part of Melaten.

The guide uses the chapel to explain how burial customs changed from the hospital graveyard to the planned cemetery of 1810 and to the present day. Your private group spends about fifteen minutes here, and this is also where the best photographs of old trees framing the monuments can be taken, especially in autumn, the best time to visit Melaten Cemetery.

The Grim Reaper and the columbarium

The emblem of Melaten is the Grim Reaper, a life-size stone figure of Death with a scythe carved in the nineteenth century for a family tomb. It shows how terrifyingly people of the Middle Ages and their descendants imagined death, and the guide explains why a family would choose such a figure to guard its grave. From here the walk continues to the columbarium, the wall of niches for urns that reflects how burial in Cologne has changed in recent decades, with cremation now common and space in the old cemetery precious.

Between the two the guide tells the stories that give this tour its name of a walk with all the senses: a tiled stove standing on a grave, graves of animals, the wreaths and small objects that families leave, and the way the cheerful people of Cologne see life and death as one, a feeling that is just as present in the city's carnival.

Nature in Melaten and planning your visit

Melaten is a park as much as a cemetery. Beneath the old lime, oak and plane trees, including one plane tree more than two hundred years old, live around forty animal species: woodpeckers, owls, squirrels, foxes and the flocks of green parakeets that are now part of Cologne. The lanes are gravel and asphalt, flat and wide, and the whole private route covers about two and a half kilometres from Gate II to Gate I on Aachener Straße.

To get to Melaten Cemetery take tram line 1 or 7 to the Melaten stop, directly in front of the Aachener Straße entrance, about fifteen minutes from the cathedral; transport is not included in this tour. The cemetery is open daily from early morning until dusk. The walk starts at 15:00, so in the winter months it ends in darkness; charge your phone and bring a small torch if you want to take photographs at the end.