Jacobsfriedhof

The burial ground is located in the Jacobsvorstadt, which in the Middle Ages provided accommodation outside the city walls for pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela (and today forms part of the historic Old Town under UNESCO protection).

After 1818, when the "Neue Friedhof vor dem Frauentore" ("New Burial Ground before the Gate of Our Lady") was opened, now known as the Historical Cemetery, Weimar, many of the graves in the Jacobsfriedhof were levelled.

On the south-eastern edge of the Jacobfriedhof stands the mausoleum known as the Kassengewölbe, originally built in 1715 by a finance official as a private place of burial for himself and his family.

[citation needed] The present Baroque pavilion, formerly with a wrought-iron gate, that stands over the Kassengewölbe, is a reconstruction of 1913, as the original was levelled, with much of the burial ground, in 1854.

The exhumed bones believed to be the poet's were transferred in 1827 to an oak coffin in the newly built Fürstengruft in the Historical Burial Ground.