After all, you can't take it with you when you die. The cemetery owes its existence to an enlightened emperor, Joseph II. For hygienic reasons he forbade burials in cemeteries within the outer walls of Vienna and ordered the creation of five communal graveyards to be placed well outside the city's walls. The cemetery was named after a nearby almshouse and former medieval hospital whose chapel had been consecrated to St Mark.
In 90 years after , some 15, people were buried here - until the Central Cemetery in allowed the dead of the city of nearly a million inhabitants to remain within the outer walls. One St. Marx burial in particular remains of interest to scientists and fans to this day.
It was an austere and meager affair without any pomp - a pitiful funeral procession on December 6th, - the day after the death, years ago, of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the genius who lived above his means and who met his end at just 35 years of age.
He did not, however, die impoverished, as is often claimed. It was more that his money was insufficient to support his lavish lifestyle. After that, only the gravedigger knew what happened.
Mozart ended up in one of the standard unmarked plots, in which four corpses were placed into a narrow shaft in order to save space. The collapsible coffin was emptied there so that it could be used again.
Ten years later the same plot would be re-used for further burials. The first opportunity to try to salvage the famous composer's remains from all the accumulated bones came in This explains how a supposed Mozart skull eventually found its way to Salzburg.
To this day, its authenticity has never been confirmed. It was not until 17 years after Mozart's death that his wife Constanze made a first attempt to locate his grave. As there were no burial crosses or any other markings on the graves, she had to rely on the very precarious recollections of the cemetery staff.
As a result the exact location of Mozart's final resting place remains a mystery. All of Vienna, and along with this Imperial city all of the musical world, mourns the untimely loss of this immortal man.
The trouble all started because they buried the great composer in a standard, unmarked plot in the St. This was perfectly normal practice at the time. In fact, the idea of Mozart as some poor musician scraping by on handouts largely belongs to the realms of myth. He earned huge amounts of money though he spent a fair deal, too, it must be said. Equally, very few people attended the actual burial: not even his wife. Again, all normal for the time. Efforts were made, however, in the mids to identify the most likely site, and instructions given to cemetery staff to ensure the location was kept in good order.
He said the results were " percent verified'' by a U. Army laboratory, but refused to elaborate. The skull in question is one that for more than a century has been in the possession of the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, the elegant Austrian city where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on Jan.
Parson said genetic material from scrapings from the skull was analyzed and compared to DNA samples gathered in from the thigh bones of Mozart's maternal grandmother and a niece. The bones were recovered when a Mozart family grave was opened in at Salzburg's Sebastian Cemetery. Mozart died in and was buried in a pauper's grave at Vienna's St. Mark's Cemetery.
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