3. Short history of the cemetery
In the Middle Ages, burials were transferred to churches and their immediate surroundings. The church rejected the urn burial traditional for old cultures. When various relics of saints began to be placed in churches, believers also wanted to be closer to their saints at the “last judgment”. The burials were thus transferred to the centres of villages or cities.
During the Josephine reforms, the city had to move the cemetery outside of its centre for at least a mile. Ptuj chose a new location on the land of the provost manor house, a slightly elevated terrain above the Grajena stream. The Church of St. Joseph standing there was built by the Ptuj citizens after a catastrophic plague epidemic that reduced the population by almost a third. When the church was demolished, the cemetery obtained a mortuary and a dwelling for the gravedigger. The cemetery was already in use in 1751, when military invalids were being buried there, but it is officially recognized that the old Ptuj cemetery was operating from the 80s of the 18th century to 1978.
