Cemetery Database

At the end of the 1990-ies the area of the cemetery was overgrown by trees and bushes. Most of the gravestones became invisible, as well as the borders of the cemetery itself. The first major cleanup took several years. Some large trees were cut down and the shrubs were eradicated. By 2005 it became clear that the total number of graves was about 3000. Most of them were not marked with gravestones. We were able to identify and number more than 700 grave structures in varying condition – from completely intact to severely damaged by time. More than 400 gravestones were found standing upright, tilted or lying down. Most of the texts were illegible.

To take photos, it was necessary to improve the visibility of the text for a short time. To achieve this, we used several methods. Most often we filled the depressions on the surface of the tombstones with a contrasting material such as coloured wet sand or shaving foam. After that, the photos were taken immediately. After the filling dried, the original appearance of the stone returned. For better visualisation, some of the images were further processed with simple software tools.

The total number of images in the collection exceeds 700, and so far we have been able to identify more than 150 names on the tombstones.