Assistens Cemetery

Assistens Cemetery (Assistens Kirkegård) in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen is both the burial place of many Danish notables and one of the city's most beloved green spaces. Inaugurated in 1760, it was originally laid out as a burial site for the poor, created to relieve the overcrowded graveyards inside the walled inner city. During the Golden Age of the early 19th century, however, it became fashionable, and many leading figures of the era were laid to rest here, including the writer Hans Christian Andersen, the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and the painters C.W. Eckersberg and Christen Købke. Later burials include the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr and several American jazz musicians who settled in Copenhagen in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Ben Webster and Kenny Drew. The term assistenskirkegård was originally a generic Danish word for a cemetery laid out to assist an older, church-associated burial site, and several cemeteries of the same name exist around Denmark. Today the Copenhagen cemetery, one of five run by the municipality, doubles as a tranquil park where locals walk, picnic and relax among the tree-lined avenues and historic graves, making it a unique place where remembrance and everyday city life meet.