2024-03-24 18:29:27
It’s a bit of a bizarre place. All kinds of tombstones, toys and fences make their way up like mushrooms after the rain along the well-trodden paths that lead around various trees and bushes. There are over two thousand pets in the Garden of Friends of the Most Faithful in Bohnice, as its founder named it in the 1990s. In addition to dogs and cats, people here also remember a chinchilla or a rat.
The memorial garden is right across from the famous “Cemetery of Fools” near the gardener’s colony in Prague’s Bohnice. While the final resting place of psychiatric hospital patients is deserted and empty today, the park with pet gravestones acts as an ornamental garden that is regularly dusted and visited by the local community. At first glance, it looks a bit like a children’s miniature of a classic cemetery.
It was founded 26 years ago by Pavel Lukáš on a plot of land of more than five hectares, who originally expected three times the area for burying four-legged pets. But the garden’s growth was stopped by unresolved disputes over land and non-fulfillment of hygiene requirements. Until 2007, when the last animal was buried at the cemetery, the owners buried over two thousand pets here. The ambassadors’ dogs and the four-legged girlfriend of former President Václav Havel also found their last rest here.
After disagreements with the town hall, Pavel Lukáš ended up at the cemetery and the Civic Association of the Pietní Park Draháň took over his care. It consists mainly of members who have buried their pets in the garden. In addition to the gravestones, they also take care of the appearance of the park, which has become a small arboretum over the course of two decades. For each four-legged friend, the owners could once plant a tree, including exotic trees, so in addition to thuja, cypresses, cork trees or Chinese water fir, which botanists thought no longer existed anywhere in the world, grow here.
Take a walk with us through Prague’s only animal cemetery.