Waldfriedhof con cimitero austro-ungarico

On a wooded slope at the edge of Brunico, soldiers of several nations from two world wars rest beneath hand-carved wooden crosses. A cemetery born of wartime field hospitals, tended by a committee of local women since 1919, it remains a place of remembrance in the Puster Valley.

Why it matters

When the First World War reached the Dolomites, Brunico stood behind the front line as a garrison and hospital town. Wounded soldiers died in the town's military hospitals faster than the parish graveyard could absorb them, so the municipality gave the military command a plot of woodland on the Kühbergl slope, towards Monte Spalliera. The soldiers' cemetery was consecrated there on 4 July 1915, with 46 graves already dug.

Today it holds the graves of 669 Austro-Hungarian soldiers, 103 Russian prisoners of war, 13 Serbs and 7 Romanians, alongside graves from the Second World War, including 19 German soldiers killed in bombing raids and an Italian officer and five citizens of Brunico who died in the war's last days. The Italian and German dead of the First World War were later transferred to ossuaries at Pocol and Passo Pordoi. The cemetery has no triumphal stonework; timber markers stand among the trees, reflecting the committee’s long care for the graves.

What to notice

Nearly every grave marker is wood, and each carries a symbol carved for the faith of the man beneath: Catholic crosses, Russian Orthodox double-bar crosses, the Star of David on Jewish graves, and the crescent for Muslim soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army. Russian and Serbian prisoners did much of the burial work here, and the markers show careful craftsmanship. The layout, drawn by the Bregenz architect and military engineer A. Bechtold, was deliberately shaped to sit inside the trees rather than clear them. Near the entrance, the small stone chapel is the cemetery's only substantial masonry structure. Flowerbeds and trimmed path edges reflect the cemetery’s continuing care, while no grave is distinguished above another.

Context and history

The founding decision came in 1915 from mayor Josef Schifferegger, who placed the land at the disposal of the command of the Col di Lana sector of the Dolomites front. The dead arrived from the town's military hospitals, and prisoners of war dug and maintained the graves. A wooden chapel used for funeral services stood opposite the Ursuline church in town; it was removed during the Fascist era, and a later stone chapel now stands near the cemetery's entrance.

In 1919 a group of Brunico women founded the Frauenkomitee Waldfriedhof, the women's committee that has cared for the cemetery ever since. The committee has explained that it does not celebrate heroes, but tends the graves so that no dead of any nation is distinguished and the events are not repeated. In 1932 the 77 Italian soldiers buried here were moved to the Pocol ossuary near Cortina, and the German dead were transferred to the war cemetery at Passo Pordoi. During the Second World War the vacant plots received new graves, giving the ground its unusual double character. The Brunico city archive marked the centenary in 2015 with a documented study of the site and its care.