Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / Sea of Flames | Mirogoj Cemetery, Zagreb, Croatia

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Sea of Flames | Mirogoj Cemetery, Zagreb, Croatia · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Miragroi Cemetery, located in Zagreb, Croatia.
0:24
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:27
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:31
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: As the day grows shorter and darker, something settles into the soul, an urge to get cozy inside the warmth of home.
0:41
Kristin: Fall has a crisp, unmistakable way of stirring it.
0:45
Kristin: We turn toward holiday cheer and family gatherings lit by a warm glow.
0:49
Kristin: Christmas markets and winter wonderlands become the ultimate December destinations, and cities like Zagreb begin to shine in the darkness.
0:57
Kristin: Yet visitors who don't know the city might pass by one of its most breathtaking sights without stepping inside.
1:03
Kristin: Its long wall of arches and green topper domas is stunning.
1:07
Kristin: You'd think you were walking into a museum or a grand civic building until it sinks in that this place was built for the dead.
1:13
Kristin: This is Miragoi.
1:15
Kristin: It holds an estimated 322,000 people.
1:18
Kristin: It was built on the ruined fortune of one man, finished by another who never saw it done, and shaken twice by the mountain behind me.
1:26
Kristin: The fairier isn't folklore, it's history.
1:29
Kristin: And this month it turns 150 years old.
1:32
Kristin: Like so many of the grand cemeteries we visited on the Grim, Mirengroin was born out of crisis.
1:37
Kristin: By the 1870s, Zagreb was running out of room for its dead.
1:41
Kristin: Newspapers at the time reported that the city's cemeteries were overcrowded.
1:45
Kristin: A city about 24,000 living souls was crowding its dead into 10 small cemeteries.
1:51
Kristin: Most of them belonged to the church, and most of them were full.
1:54
Kristin: The city needed a new place to bury its people.
1:57
Kristin: It found one of the wind slopes north of the town on an estate called Miragroi.
2:01
Kristin: The estate belonging Lujvi Gaj.
2:03
Kristin: To Croatians, Gaj was a towering figure.
2:06
Kristin: He was a linguist, a journalist, and a leader of the Croatian national revival, the movement that vowed to give Croatians a shared language and a national identity inside the Hasburg Empire.
2:17
Kristin: He shaped the way Croatian is written to this day.
2:20
Kristin: But Gaj was also deeply in debt.
2:22
Kristin: According to the cemetery's own history, he remodeled his summer residence in Miragos entirely at his own cost.
2:30
Kristin: He even built his own access road up the hill.
2:32
Kristin: The project, though, drained him.
2:34
Kristin: One Zacrobic count puts it plainly.
2:37
Kristin: The city had its eye on the land, but no one would move to evicted man of his standing, so the city waited.
2:43
Kristin: Gosh died in April of 1872.
2:46
Kristin: His debts were so large that his estate had to be auctioned.
2:50
Kristin: On January 24, 1873, the city bought it.
2:54
Kristin: The money came partly from two old church cemeteries, St.
2:56
Kristin: Roche and St.
2:57
Kristin: George's, that were being closed.
3:00
Kristin: In return, the city promised the archdiocese they would build a beautiful chapel at Miragos.
3:05
Kristin: Hold on to that promise, it would take more than half a century to keep it.
3:09
Kristin: The city also agreed to leave Gaj's park untouched.
3:12
Kristin: Workers planted rows of linden, maple, spruce, and horse chestnut along the main avenues, many of them along the very roads Gaj had paid to build.
3:21
Kristin: The man who couldn't afford his estate became the reason the city could bury its dead there, and Gaj himself would not rest quietly.
3:28
Kristin: He was first buried in the old St.
3:30
Kristin: George's Cemetery in town, but Miragosh wasn't finished with him.
3:34
Kristin: The cemetery was handed over to the city on November 1st, 1876.
3:38
Kristin: It officially opened five days later on November 6.
3:42
Kristin: One day after that, Miragosh received his first burial.
3:46
Kristin: His name was Frederick Singer.
3:47
Kristin: He was a physical education and fencing teacher, not a noble, not a hero of the nation.
3:53
Kristin: But someone had to be the first, and the city made sure his arrival was remembered.
3:58
Kristin: The authorities organized a magnificent funeral service for him.
4:01
Kristin: One local account notes that his family hadn't expected anything of the kind.
4:05
Kristin: Singer was just the first, and hundreds of thousands would follow.
4:09
Kristin: Less than three weeks later, on November 25th, 1876, Miragrosh received its founding rules, the public cemetery statute, and those rules made it unusual for its time.
4:20
Kristin: The old cemeteries of Zagreb had been church property.
4:24
Kristin: Miragros belonged to the city, though, and the statute declared it a public cemetery for people of any religion with equal rights and duties for all.
4:32
Kristin: The ground was still divided.
4:34
Kristin: Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Jews were each given their own section.
4:39
Kristin: Graves were sorted into first, second, and third class.
4:42
Kristin: The best plots, the family tombs beneath the arcades, were sold forevermore.
4:46
Kristin: The statute also had rules for the dead themselves.
4:49
Kristin: Any coffin placed in a tomb had to be made of metal and hermetically sealed.
4:53
Kristin: Coffins in ordinary graves could be wood.
4:56
Kristin: In 1879, an architect named Hermann Bole began building the wall that would make Miragosh famous.
5:02
Kristin: Bole was born in Cologne and trained in Vienna.
5:04
Kristin: He had only recently arrived in Croatia and would go on to shape much of Zagreb, including its cathedral, but Miragosh became the work most tied to his name.
5:13
Kristin: His design was a long, unbroken procession of arkens, linked by pavilions and crowned with domes.
5:19
Kristin: Behind each arc, families could buy a tomb and raise a monument.
5:22
Kristin: Arc by arc, it grew along the hillside.
5:25
Kristin: A pattern fell nowhere else on this scale.
5:28
Kristin: Step beneath one of those green copper domes and the light changes.
5:32
Kristin: The inside of each dome is painted in soft pastels, from duck egg blue to pale yellow.
5:37
Kristin: Eight small windows ring the rim, and the daylight falls through them onto the paintwork.
5:42
Kristin: The way of Mightnick Cathedral, above the dead boley-built rooms made for light, with Miracroge open, the old cemeteries of Zagreb could finally close.
5:51
Kristin: Between 1876 and 1879, one by one, every old graveyard in the city closed its gates.
5:59
Kristin: And then the moving began.
6:01
Kristin: One of the first to come was the poet Peter Peradovic, the most beloved creation poet of his generation.
6:07
Kristin: In the early hours of July 14, 1879, his remains arrived in Zagreb for a second burial.
6:14
Kristin: That day, every shop and office in the city closed.
6:17
Kristin: A formal procession led by soldiers and a band carried him to Marigog, and his reburial became a patriotic demonstration against the Germanizing pressure of the Empire.
6:27
Kristin: He was laid to rest in one of the very first arcades.
6:30
Kristin: The monument over his grave was covered by Ivan Rendick.
6:33
Kristin: Rendick was one of the many leading sculptures, Ivan Minstrovic, among them, those work would turn Merigot into an open-air gallery of the dead.
6:41
Kristin: The mountain, though, tested Boley's work almost immediately.
6:44
Kristin: In 1880, a violent earthquake struck Zachary.
6:47
Kristin: The epicenter was on the mountain directly behind the cemetery.
6:51
Kristin: Around 1,700 homes were badly damaged.
6:54
Kristin: According to the cemetery's records, Boley's young arcades didn't suffer even the slightest damage.
7:00
Kristin: Society, scholars, and religious communities worked to exhume their most distinguished dead and carry them with their monuments up the hill.
7:08
Kristin: On October 15, 1885, a special arcade was completed for the leading figures of the Croatian national revival.
7:15
Kristin: The city authorities decided who would be admitted to it.
7:19
Kristin: Lujevic Gaj was among them.
7:21
Kristin: His remains were dug up from St.
7:22
Kristin: George's and carried back to Marigoy to lie on the ground that had ruined him.
7:26
Kristin: Gaj came home just as his house was being given to the dead.
7:30
Kristin: In 1883, construction began on a mortuary, built on the site of Gaj Summer Mansion.
7:36
Kristin: It wasn't an easy sell, though.
7:38
Kristin: At the time Zachreb families kept their dead at home until burial, the idea of sending a loved one to a public building felt foreign.
7:45
Kristin: Officials were so careful about it that every mention of the mortuary had to carry the phrase, for the deceased to lie in state.
7:52
Kristin: The rules adopted in December 1885, while construction was still underway made the mortuary optional.
7:59
Kristin: Except in certain cases, the city could order a body taken there if the person died of a contagious disease or a skin condition, or if the family lived in a home so cramped and crowded that there was nowhere for the dead to wait.
8:12
Kristin: Anyone due for an autopsy had to be held there as well.
8:15
Kristin: The dead though didn't wait for the builders to finish.
8:18
Kristin: The first person to lie and stayed at the Miragor Mortuary was a nymph named Ivan Mishner.
8:23
Kristin: On January 15, 1886, the building was formally completed three months later on April 5th.
8:30
Kristin: Think about where he lay in the ruins where Loujevik Gaj had once spent his fortune.
8:35
Kristin: The dead of Zacharib now waited for the ground.
8:38
Kristin: In 1845, during election unrest in Zagreb, Imperial soldiers had opened fire on a crowd.
8:44
Kristin: Nine men were killed on the spot, seven more died from their wounds, and twenty seven people were injured.
8:50
Kristin: They became known as the July victims, and they were buried at St.
8:54
Kristin: George's beneath the sculpture of a sleeping lion.
8:57
Kristin: In 1895, their remains were moved to a common tomb at Marigoy.
9:01
Kristin: The transfer though turned into an anti-Hungarian protest.
9:04
Kristin: Fifty-five years after the shooting, the dead were still stirring up the living.
9:08
Kristin: The sleeping lion came with them and still rests on their graves today.
9:13
Kristin: Remember the city's promise to build a chapel, Belay wanted the chapel in Grand Portal to be his crowning work, the center joining the North and South Arcades.
9:22
Kristin: He drew the design in 1914.
9:24
Kristin: Then came the First World War, and there was no money.
9:28
Kristin: The cemetery's funds, carefully saved for decades, were lost.
9:31
Kristin: To finally pay for the chapel, a city commissioner made what the cemetery's history calls an advanced commercial move.
9:38
Kristin: He sold tombs in the church crypt before the church was even built.
9:41
Kristin: The dead paid for their own sanctuary in advance.
9:44
Kristin: Herman Voley died on April 17, in 1926.
9:48
Kristin: The Portal and Church of Christ the King were completed on November 1st, 1929.
9:53
Kristin: Fifty-three years had passed since the cemetery opened its gates.
9:57
Kristin: Voley is buried in Marigoy, inside the work he never got to finish.
10:01
Kristin: Of all the graves beneath the arcades, few have drawn crowds like the tomb of Stefan Radden.
10:06
Kristin: Raddock founded the Croatian People's Peasant Party, and by the 1920s, he was the most powerful Croatian voice in the new kingdom of Surs, Croats, and Sloves.
10:15
Kristin: He was also a constant thorn to the government in Belgrade.
10:18
Kristin: He had been arrested and imprisoned more than once.
10:21
Kristin: On the morning of June 20th, in 1928, Raddock was warned that his life was in danger.
10:26
Kristin: If he went to parliament that day, he went anyway.
10:30
Kristin: During the session, a deputy from the Serbian Radical Party drew a pistol and opened fire on the Croatian members.
10:36
Kristin: Two of them were killed, including one of Raddock's own relatives.
10:40
Kristin: Raddock himself was gravely wounded.
10:42
Kristin: By most accounts, the whole attack was over in less than a minute.
10:45
Kristin: For seven weeks he lay wounded in Zagreb while the country waited.
10:49
Kristin: He died on August 8, in 1928, at the age of 57.
10:53
Kristin: His funeral was one of the largest events the city had ever seen.
10:57
Kristin: It became something more than a burial, though.
10:59
Kristin: It turned into a protest against the regime.
11:02
Kristin: His death opened a rift between Croats and Serbs that would outlast the kingdom itself.
11:06
Kristin: Raddock was laid to rest in the arcades.
11:09
Kristin: Since 2015, Croatia has marked every June 20th as a day of remembrance for the victims of that shooting.
11:16
Kristin: But in recent years, those who have come to honor Raddock have had to stop short.
11:21
Kristin: What the arcades damaged by an earthquake will come to.
11:24
Kristin: Delegations have laid their reeves at the cemetery's Central Cross instead.
11:28
Kristin: His tomb is still here, though, behind the fencing, waiting for the arcades to be made safe.
11:33
Kristin: Not every grave within, though, sits beneath the dome.
11:36
Kristin: Out among the ordinary family plots, there's a small square of ground bordered by a hedge by three sides.
11:42
Kristin: It's marked by a modest monument and a small stone.
11:45
Kristin: Visitors leave candles, flowers, and toys.
11:48
Kristin: The stone says that several hundred children from Kozara are buried here.
11:53
Kristin: Only a few meters away, in the summer of 1942, during the Second World War, German forces and the Eustache, the fascist regime that ruled Croatia, launched an offense against the Kozara Mountain region in Bosnia.
12:06
Kristin: There it was home mostly to Serbs.
12:09
Kristin: According to one historian's count, around 69,000 people were driven from Kozara.
12:14
Kristin: Among the nearly 24,000 children under the age of 15, many were sent to concentration camps.
12:20
Kristin: Some of the children were rescued from the camps through the efforts of a woman named Diana Budoslavic, and others who worked with her.
12:28
Kristin: Thousands were brought to Zagreb, to hospitals, children's homes, and families who took them in.
12:34
Kristin: But many arrived starving, sick, and exhausted.
12:37
Kristin: Hundreds didn't survive.
12:39
Kristin: Those who died in Transferred or in Zagreb's hospitals and shelters were buried at Marigoy in plot 142.
12:45
Kristin: The cemetery's keeper at the time, Joseph Kavizic, later described what he saw.
12:50
Kristin: The bodies of the children arrived every day.
12:52
Kristin: Some came in small caskets, others came wrapped in cloths or sheets.
12:56
Kristin: Because most were known to come from Kozara and the surrounding villages, the plot was simply called Kozara.
13:02
Kristin: No one knows exactly how many children lie here.
13:05
Kristin: A list compiled in 1947 by the Orthodox Parish and Zaprid counted 802.
13:11
Kristin: One author who studied the burials puts it at 862.
13:15
Kristin: According to Pavisek, the grave wasn't talked about after the war.
13:19
Kristin: A monument came later.
13:20
Kristin: Today it's easy to walk past without knowing what it is.
13:24
Kristin: It's only the toys that give it away.
13:26
Kristin: The children of Kozara aren't alone.
13:28
Kristin: Marigo keeps the dead of every war the city has known.
13:32
Kristin: Walk the grounds, and you pass through a century of conflict, each war leaving its own monument, each monument telling its story differently.
13:40
Kristin: During the First World War, soldiers buried at Marigo were laid in third class graves, the plainest the cemetery offered.
13:46
Kristin: The memorial came later, above an ossuary holding the remains of 3,300 soldiers.
13:52
Kristin: A monument by Croatian sculptures was erased in 1940.
13:56
Kristin: Its inscription honors the fallen Croatian soldiers of the First World War from 1914 to 1918.
14:02
Kristin: But the bones beneath it are not only Croatian.
14:05
Kristin: The ossuary holds soldiers of the old Austrian-Hungarian monarchy, of Serbia, and of other nations.
14:11
Kristin: Men who were enemies in life lie together in a single vault.
14:15
Kristin: When Croatia's Postal Service chose the monument for a stamp in 2014, it described it as a monument of peace, chosen precisely because of the memories of that war that still divide people.
14:26
Kristin: The Second World War left a different kind of grave.
14:29
Kristin: In 1968, while Croatia was still part of Yugoslavia, the country built the tomb of people's heroes.
14:35
Kristin: Buried inside are men and women honored for their heroism in the Second World War, along with leaning figures of the Yugoslav workers' movement.
14:43
Kristin: The stone is carved like a flag rippling in the wind, marked by a five-point star and a hammer and sickle.
14:49
Kristin: The country that built it no longer exists, but the tomb is still a place of state ceremony.
14:54
Kristin: On national holidays, Croatian officials lay race here, and on victory over Fascism Day, resident has come to lay a rose and light a candle.
15:02
Kristin: The newest of the three, though, began, not as a monument at all, but as a protest.
15:07
Kristin: In September of 1993, Croatia was at war, the war the Croatians called the Homeland War.
15:13
Kristin: On Silka Street in Zagreb, outside the headquarters of the United Nations peacekeepers, families of the dead and missing began laying bricks on the sidewalk.
15:22
Kristin: On each brick, they wrote a name: black bricks for those killed, red bricks for those missing.
15:27
Kristin: The wall grew to about 13,600 bricks, and it became known as the Wall of Pain.
15:33
Kristin: In 2005, the city ordered the wall moved to Marigoy.
15:36
Kristin: When the crews began dismantling it, though, veteran groups subjected and took bricks back.
15:41
Kristin: Some bricks were damaged beyond repair.
15:43
Kristin: In the end, the family's own association agreed to the move, saying it was the will of those who had built the wall.
15:49
Kristin: The bricks were buried in the ground at Marigoy, and a memorial carrying all the names opened in October of 2006.
15:55
Kristin: It's called The Voice of the Croatian Victim, The Wall of Pain.
15:59
Kristin: The names once stood on a city sidewalk, written by grieving hands.
16:03
Kristin: Now they lie in the earth.
16:05
Kristin: The bricks themselves were given a burial.
16:08
Kristin: For 140 years, Bole's arcades stood as proof they couldn't be broken.
16:12
Kristin: The earthquake of 1880 didn't leave a mark on them.
16:15
Kristin: Then came the morning of March 22nd, 2020.
16:18
Kristin: The city was already in the grip of a pandemic when a magnitude 5.5 earthquake struck Zagreb.
16:24
Kristin: Once again the shaking came from the mountain behind the cemetery.
16:28
Kristin: This time the arcades didn't escape.
16:30
Kristin: The arcades and the Church of Christ the King, both protected as monuments of the highest category, suffered severe damage, so did the tombs of some of the most honored figures in Croatian history.
16:41
Kristin: By that November, the cemetery counted about 6,000 damaged graves.
16:45
Kristin: A second strong earthquake hit the region later that same year.
16:49
Kristin: The arcades were fenced off for safety, and the public was kept out of them and out of the church until further notice.
16:55
Kristin: That day has not yet fully come.
16:57
Kristin: The historic arcades still wait full restoration, wrapped in scaffolding and safety barriers.
17:02
Kristin: The painted domes, the rooms Ebolay built to let the light in, became the rooms no one could enter.
17:08
Kristin: Then in March of 2026, severe storms tore through Miragoy, uprooting trees and striking monuments as they fell.
17:14
Kristin: Broken arches and fallen trees having kept Zagreb away.
17:18
Kristin: Every year the people come back.
17:20
Kristin: All Saints Day, November 1st, is a national holiday in Croatia.
17:24
Kristin: Families clean the graves of their loved ones, lay fresh flowers, and light candles.
17:29
Kristin: For three days, Maragoy's gates stay open from dawn until midnight.
17:33
Kristin: State delegations lay Reese, and the Archbishop of Zagreb celebrates Mass on the grounds.
17:38
Kristin: By evening, the hills lit by a sea of flames.
17:41
Kristin: Thousands of small lights burn among the stones, and the crowds are the largest just before sunset as the candles take hold.
17:48
Kristin: For all its size, its age, and its dead, Maragoy has no well-documented ghost story of its own, no sourced legend of a figure in the arcades, no recorded haunting.
17:58
Kristin: The figure as it was from the start is in folklore, its history.
18:02
Kristin: There is, however, an old theory that hangs over the entire city.
18:05
Kristin: In Croatian, Zagrobon, meaning beyond the grave, and something that's where the name Zagreb comes from.
18:12
Kristin: It's one of only several theories, and none have been actually proven.
18:16
Kristin: But before Miragoi, Zagreb's dead were scattered across many small graveyards in the heart of the city.
18:22
Kristin: Still, it's hard to stand on this hill at the edge of the city beyond so many graves and not think of it.
18:28
Kristin: On November 6, 2026, Miragoi turned 150 years old.
18:32
Kristin: A ruined man's death gave it ground.
18:35
Kristin: Its architect never saw it finished.
18:37
Kristin: Its arches survived one earthquake and not the next.
18:41
Kristin: And its small spot holds hundreds of children who came to Zagreb to be saved.
18:45
Kristin: It began here with a single grave, a fencing teacher.
18:49
Kristin: Today it holds an estimated 322,000 people.
18:52
Kristin: And every November, when the candles are lit, the city still climbs a hill to stand among them.
18:58
Kristin: For now, the stories of Miragoy Cemetery slid back into the stones, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
19:05
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil of Miragoy Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
19:12
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar.
19:16
Kristin: And so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.