Skogskyrkogården
— — a forest that holds the city's dead.
Not only on a wall.
“Skogskyrkogården is a cemetery shaped like a forest. Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz won the commission in 1915 and worked on it together until 1940. They planted pines on glacial ridges, set low chapels into clearings, and laid a single granite cross on the open meadow above the entrance. Roughly a hundred thousand graves rest beneath the trees, including Greta Garbo's.
Skogskyrkogården, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
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The place, in three passes.
Skogskyrkogården, the Woodland Cemetery, lies in Enskede about seven kilometres south of central Stockholm and is reached by the green metro line at Skogskyrkogården station. The site covers about 100 hectares of pine forest on a glacial moraine. Architects Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz won an international competition in 1915 and developed the cemetery in phases from 1917 until Asplund's death in 1940. UNESCO inscribed the cemetery on its World Heritage List in 1994, citing it as a fusion of architecture and natural landscape that has shaped cemetery design worldwide. Approximately 100,000 people are buried here.
The forest is the dominant fact of the place. The pines are mostly Scots pine planted at the start of the twentieth century, allowed to grow tall and thin so that the lower trunks read as columns and the canopy as a single ceiling. Sound is absorbed. Even on a summer Saturday, the gravelled paths between the chapels carry only the crunch of footsteps and the wind in the high branches. The Way of the Cross runs uphill from the entrance for roughly 800 metres without a bench, and the granite cross above it is visible from the metro platform.
The cemetery is open daily and free to enter, with no fixed closing hour for the grounds themselves. The visitor centre near the main entrance opens longer hours from May through September and offers guided English-language tours on Sundays in summer. Greta Garbo, returned to Sweden after her death in 1990, is buried in section 21A, a short walk from the meditation grove. Photography is permitted in the landscape; the chapels ask for stillness during services. The metro from T-Centralen takes about fifteen minutes on the green line toward Farsta strand.