Memorial stone at the Johannis Cemetery in Nuremberg by Thomas Riess

About "Memorial stone at the Johannis Cemetery in Nuremberg"

by Thomas Riess

About the artwork

The Johannisfriedhof is an ecclesiastical cemetery in Nuremberg with historical and artistically valuable bronze epitaphs as well as culturally and historically significant lying (standardised) gravestones and burial sites of the Nuremberg population from more than five centuries. Because of its historical sights, the Johannisfriedhof is a destination for cemetery tourism and a stop on Nuremberg's Historic Mile. The nucleus of the later Johannisfriedhof was a so-called Siechkobel (leper house) for lepers in 1234. In 1238, Pope Gregory IX approved a burial ground with a chapel here, which was the predecessor of St. John's Church around 1250. In the years that followed, this churchyard was used not only by the inmates of the Siechkobel but also by farmers from the surrounding area as a place of burial. The choir of today's St. John's Church was consecrated in 1377, the nave in 1395. The chapel has hardly changed its appearance since then: Around 1395, on the occasion of a plague epidemic, the space around St. Stephen's Chapel (predecessor of the Holzschuher Chapel), which was consecrated in that year, was also used as a burial place for victims of the disease. These burials outside the walls were also the exception in the following 15th century. Only when epidemics exceeded the capacity of the churchyards around the churches of St. Sebald and St. Lorenz, St. Jacob and the Heilig-Geist-Spital did this step take place, whereby the burial ground to the west of St. Stephen's Chapel was probably extended in 1427 and 1457. After the hygienic conditions in the churchyards within the city walls had become intolerable in the late 15th century, the sovereign of the imperial city of Nuremberg, Emperor Maximilian I, issued a mandate on 31 October 1518, according to which all burials had to take place outside the city walls in times of plague. On this basis, the city council was able to enforce, even against the objections of the clergy, that for the