Kaplica, Wrocław

At the entrance, the sculpted figure of Death leads a naked woman and man by the hand beneath a veil. This is the Osobowice Cemetery chapel: a funeral chapel and mortuary designed by Max Berg and completed in 1921. Berg’s fourth design finally made it off the drawing board after three earlier attempts between 1910 and 1919 had not been built.

Construction began in May 1920, and the chapel opened on the eighth of December 1921. Its clustered, box-like volumes belong to modernism, and this was among Wrocław’s early examples of Neues Bauen, with a flat roof and deliberately restrained exterior. The building was conceived as a complete work in which architecture, painting, sculpture, and furnishings belonged together.

Berg designed even the catafalque, iron cross, candlesticks, and benches. Hans Leistikow created abstract frescoes and stained glass inside, although the frescoes were painted over after the war. After the cemetery’s older chapel was demolished after 1945, this became its only place for religious masses and secular funeral ceremonies. It still serves its original chapel and mortuary roles, and it entered the heritage register in 2010.