The Cypresses of the First Cemetery of Athens

Athens's grandest 19th century cemetery reads like an open-air sculpture museum, and the cypresses planted around its edges were a public health measure before they were ever a landscaping choice. When the First Cemetery was established in 1837, four years after Otto arrived as Greece's first king, municipal rules required burial grounds to sit at least 100 metres outside the city and to be screened with trees, ideally on a hillside for ventilation, a sanitary theory of the era that happened to also produce a genuinely beautiful result. Cypress, pine and olive went in from the start, and the layout was formalised in 1861 into the maze of paths visitors walk today. Cypress carries its own symbolism here beyond the practical planting brief: in Greek tradition it is the tree of mourning and the underworld, planted in cemeteries for exactly the reason it now shades this one. Some of the original trees from that 1837 to 1861 planting window are still standing, making them among the oldest deliberately planted cypresses in modern Athens, though no individual specimen here has its own published age or measurement. The cemetery holds the graves of Heinrich Schliemann and Melina Mercouri among thousands of others, is free to enter, and stays open daily.