Halloween arrived in Vienna, but somehow, it always feels a little bit like that. After all, Halloween didn’t start as a sugar-high costume night, you know, the one night a year where a girl can dress as a total sl*t and no other girl can say anything about it. No, it was once a solemn remembrance of the dead. In Mexico, Día de los Muertos celebrates a joyful return of ancestors. In Ireland and the Celtic world, Samhain marked the night where spirits wandered freely among the living.

And Vienna? Well, Vienna has been flirting with death long before pumpkins became seasonal décor, we never need a reminder to think about death.
Here, Allerheiligen (1st of Nov) and Allerseelen (2nd of Nov) are our real holidays, the annual pilgrimage to polish graves, light candles, and silently judge whose floral arrangements are lacking respect and taste. While other cities flirt with spooky vibes once a year, Vienna maintains a year-round relationship with the dearly departed. A committed one.

With Halloween night done and dusted, the real Viennese show is starting: The 71er Journey. For anyone who doesn’t know, the 71er Bim, as we lovingly call her, is the tram taking you from the city centre directly to all three entrances of our beloved Zentralfriedhof, the real catwalk of this weekend. Half of the city is lying there already, the other half is visiting this weekend. Literally their slogan.

My stepmother described the whole phenomenon quite well last week: “That’s the real party, you start saying hello to people you know in the tram, continue on the cemetery, and then say hello to the ones you missed on the way back home again in the tram.” It’s a real see and be seen, because if you’re not seen, you run the risk someone may think you’re not actually taking care of your beloved’s grave, and we truly can’t have that. No one judges better than a Viennese on Allerheiligen.

Generally speaking though: dying is big in Vienna. We die in style, obviously. Here, death isn’t the end, it’s a well-planned social event. We don’t rest in peace, we rest in prestige. And we have all that to thank for our funeral culture. A culture so deeply embedded, we have our own magistrate of death: Bestattung Wien. And oh boy, do they come with jokes.

Bestattung Wien is kind of best described as Vienna’s couture house of eternal rest, but make it funny. Nothing thrives more on our deeply embedded black humour than this magistrate. They not only run their own Museum of Funerals, other countries would scream in morbid shock, but also produce their own merchandise. No, I’m not joking. You can buy lunchboxes engraved with “Leichenschmaus” (Funeral Feast), LEGO sets of graves and mausoleums, T-shirts with ridiculously funny slogans that could never be translated into English (ok I’ll try: I read until I rot; From gym right into the urn. Sorry guys, you gotta learn German for these!). My favourite is always their summer collection, where they market sunscreen called Leichenblässe (deathly pallor) or sell coffin-shaped floats, or black little fans saying “Death of Heatstroke? No thanks”.

If you thought that was the highest level of dark humour available, allow me to prove you adorably naïve. Bestattung Wien doesn’t just celebrate the idea of death, they invite you to try before you die.

Welcome to the annual Coffin Testing Event. Yes, that’s a real thing, not a sketch from SNL. (Ok, I gotta be honest, I’m pushing it a bit. It’s not the annual event; actually, there are several of those events per year. But that just proves even more that this is a normal thing happening in Vienna, not just a Halloween marketing gag.)

Tonight, on Halloween, between 4 and 8 PM, the city’s most daring hypochondriacs can treat themselves to a cute little wellness outing straight into the afterlife. You pick a coffin, the staff fluff your funeral pillow, and then you simply… lie down. Full test drive. Zero commitment. Just you, your thoughts, and a fleeting panic about whether oak complements your complexion, or if maybe you’d look better in mahogany after all.

And while it’s easy to laugh and call us crazy, and honestly, you absolutely should, there’s something deeper buried beneath all this morbid mischief and dark humour. Vienna’s intimacy with death developed over centuries, shaped by Catholic rituals, imperial grandeur, and a population convinced that even if your life was a little underwhelming, it can still end in a spectacular finale.
This is a place where the send-off matters just as much as the life itself. A funeral isn’t merely logistics, it’s expression. It’s virtue. The ultimate display of love, loyalty, and yes, a hint of competitive pride.

Graves were once the ultimate status symbol; even in death, the Viennese refused to be anything less than iconic. Our Zentralfriedhof is living (or not?) proof of that. The sheer scale of it, the grandness of graves, mausoleums and architecture is honestly mind-blowing. Not just we ourselves were transfixed by death: Mahler composed for it, Klimt painted it, Schnitzler psychoanalysed it, and Freud, well, he turned our anxieties into a global academic export.

“Die schöne Leich”, the beautiful corpse, captures Vienna perfectly.
Death isn’t feared. It’s styled, scheduled, and socially evaluated. 

In Vienna, the afterlife isn’t the unknown.

It’s the other side of the tram line.

Eleonore Marie Stifter - Resident Viennese. Writes about culture, taste, and the art of complaining beautifully.