Military Cemeteries in Prague, Olšany

I have been visiting our family grave in the Olšany cemetery in Prague for over fifty years. I always take the shortest way. Today I thought I'd take a different route.

I admit that @godfish inspired me with his article. But he was walking through a different part of the same cemetery, the older one.

I wondered how many squirrels I'd see today. Countless. But I only take pictures with my cell phone. They let me within two meters of them. Then they ran away.

What would you expect in a cemetery other than graves? Some of them are well kept.

Some are not so well maintained. But photographs of graves, that's not a proper story. We'll take a look at the military burial grounds. They're here, too.

Soldiers from the First World War. The soldiers stand in rows and their graves are also in rows. A soldier is a soldier. Even if he's dead. Actually, these are just symbolic graves.

This is a real grave. There is a large cellar under this small building. The ossuary. There are the remains of about 3,500 Austrian soldiers here who died in Prague in the infirmaries where they were recovering from their wounds. And you see a wall in the back.

This memorial, on the other hand, is built for those Prague citizens who fell and are buried outside their homeland. In total there are 1105 markers. Why so few? At that time there was the so-called Little Prague, around which was a ring of other small towns, which were only connected to Prague in 1922.

There are graves of executed deserters and mutineers. And many other graves with stories that the inscriptions on the monuments refer to. But I cannot expect the reader to know Czech history. (By the way. There's a Jewish cemetery behind that wall. Also an interesting place.)

Now I'm going to jump to World War II.

Commonwealth soldiers' burial ground. Prisoners of war who died in prison camps.

There are not a few graves here. Right half of the burial ground.

Most of the graves have a name on them. But not on all of them.

Now something that violates my timeline. The grave of 45 Russian officers wounded in the battles of Dresden and Kulm in 1813. The Napoleonic Wars. There were so many wounded then, they were transported hundreds of miles away. And they didn't recover here.
The grave was moved here, originally it was located in another part of the cemetery. Here it was added to the other Russian graves.

The Second World War in Europe ended with the surrender of Germany on 8 May 1945. The Soviet army entered Prague on the morning of May 9, 1945. Only a few forgotten German military units and units of the SS and Hitler Youth fanatics remained. The Soviets fought them until May 11.

The rest of the world was just celebrating peace.

Not even all the Soviet soldiers have their names here.

Even native Czechs do not know that the Bulgarian army liberated Prague together with the Soviet army.

Saddest at the end. You won't find these sights on the map. Members of the Russian Liberation Army are buried here. They were former Soviet prisoners of war who joined the German side and fought against Stalin. Their motives were different.

At the end of the war, Prague rose up against the Nazis. They managed to convince an entire division of the Russian Liberation Army to join the uprising.

The luckier soldiers fell in battle. The wounded were shot in their hospital beds by Soviet soldiers after the liberation of Prague. The healthy ones were deported to the Soviet Union, where some were executed and some were sent to work themselves to death in concentration camps.

Cemeteries are sad places. I can't imagine a happy ending to this article. And I have photographic material for several more articles.