Notre-Dame Cemetery

Everyone in Luxembourg calls this the Nikloskierfecht, Saint Nicholas's graveyard, and there has been no Saint Nicholas here for two and a half centuries. The church of that name stood in the middle of the old town until 1779, when it was pulled down and its parish moved into the empty Jesuit church — the cathedral now. The parish graveyard moved with it, out through the New Gate to the glacis, beside the chapel of Our Lady; hence the official name, and hence the nickname, which the city has never given up. The ground was not new to burials. Since 1691 there had been a small graveyard by the chapel for those condemned to death who were not criminals — deserters from the garrison, mostly — and the parish simply took it over and added two gardens, one the chapel's, one belonging to the Holy Ghost convent.

It is the largest of the city's fourteen cemeteries and, under its plane trees, the most beautiful. Two monuments stand among the family tombs. One is the mausoleum of the French soldiers who died in Luxembourg in the First World War, and of the unknown Luxembourgish legionary who died in France. The other is the Hinzert Cross, the national monument to the resistance and the deportation: a plain cross made by a carpenter named Colabianchi, himself a former prisoner, from planks taken from the concentration camp at Hinzert, over the graves of eighty-two Luxembourgers executed there and at the Klingelpütz prison in Cologne and brought home to lie here. Lucien Wercollier's bronze of the political prisoner has stood beside it since 1969; the guide tells its story at the monument itself.

Walk the main alleys and you pass most of the country's last two centuries — the mayors, the industrialists, the artists and the poets, and the gravestones the sculptors made for each other.