The Columbarium: Skogskyrkogården

The Columbarium is a free, weekly newsletter where the history of death and dying meets practical advice about the same. Enjoy this issue from the archive—and if you like it, consider signing up!

Whenever I travel, I love to visit historic cemeteries. Shocker. 

I figured I might tell you about a few of the most remarkable in this newsletter. And since my 35th birthday trip to Stockholm was exactly two years ago, I’ve decided to start with Skogskyrkogården. 

Okay. That’s a whole ass word, isn’t it? Skogskyrkogården. It literally means “the woodland cemetery” in Swedish. Skog = forest, and kyrkogård = churchyard, or cemetery. The -en at the end of the word means “the,” because in Swedish the article “the” gets tacked onto the ends of words, but not the article “a,” which goes in front the same way it does in English.

There’s your Swedish grammar lesson for the day.

In the early 1900s, Stockholm had a lot of dead people and not enough graveyards. Tale as old as time. In addition to expanding other cemeteries, the city decided to hold a design competition for a new cemetery. 

Enter the young architects Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, who won the competition in 1915 at age 30. The land set aside for the new cemetery was a series of old gravel pits overgrown with tall pine trees. Asplund and Lewerentz had the radical idea to just…keep the pine trees. 

Aside from the open field at the entrance, Skogskyrkogården is in a forest. The graves aren’t in neat little rows the way you might find in more traditional cemeteries—they’re laid out wherever the landscape allows. And the monuments marking each grave are typically smaller and simpler. Even Greta Garbo’s isn’t too flashy. Asplund and Lewerentz designed the cemetery’s chapels and other buildings to be relatively minimalist. Nature is the star of the show. 

Skogskyrkogården was initially built from 1917-1920, and in 1994 it was named a UNESCO World Heritage site. I visited in February 2023 after a light snowfall. It was gorgeous. 

Photographic evidence:

Pro tip: don’t walk to Skogskyrkogården and back immediately after getting a tattoo. I made it to my hotel before I collapsed, but it was a close thing. 

If Sweden is too far to go for your parents’ burial, you can find cemeteries in your area (and lots of other state-by-state resources) here. 

Sources: Stockholms stad - Skogskyrkogården, UNESCO World Heritage Convention