Olšany Cemetery

Did you know that beneath your feet lie over two MILLION souls, making this the largest cemetery in the Czech Republic... and that somewhere among these weathered headstones, a vampire panic once gripped Prague so fiercely that graves were opened and bodies staked through the heart? As you stand at these iron gates, you're looking at 50 hectares of history that began in 1680 during the Great Plague. See that crumbling baroque chapel to your right? That's where Franz Kafka's funeral service was held in 1924, though barely forty people attended – nobody knew they were burying a literary giant. The cemetery expanded eleven times over three centuries, swallowing entire villages, and if you look carefully between the older sections, you'll spot the original cobblestone paths from those lost settlements still peeking through. Here's what most visitors never realize: Jan Palach, the student who set himself on fire in 1969 to protest Soviet occupation, was originally buried here in plot 104... until the secret police exhumed him at midnight because too many pilgrims were visiting. And those Art Nouveau tombs you see? They're not just decorative – wealthy families hired the same architects who designed Prague's grandest buildings, creating an entire city of the dead with miniature castles, Egyptian pyramids, and even a scaled-down version of St. Vitus Cathedral.