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At the corner of Wiertnicza and Wilanowska streets, a few hundred metres from the palace and St Anne's collegiate church, lies the Wilanów Cemetery. It was founded in 1816, which makes it more than two hundred years old today and older than any of the housing estates that now fill the district. Even so, most drivers heading down Wilanowska towards Konstancin pass its wall without a single glance.
The cemetery was founded by Aleksandra Potocka, née Lubomirska, together with her husband Stanisław Kostka Potocki and their son Aleksander Stanisław Potocki, the owners of the Wilanów estate in the early nineteenth century. The original layout was modest: a small, circular plot enclosed by a wooden openwork fence on a brick base, with a gate on the eastern side reached by an avenue of linden trees. Little of that original layout survives in the landscape today, but the basic idea, a quiet, enclosed place with an avenue leading to the gate, has lasted to this day.
Aigner's chapel and the Potocki brothers' graves
At the centre of the cemetery stands a brick chapel mausoleum, built between 1824 and 1826 to a design by Chrystian Piotr Aigner, one of the most important classicist architects working in Warsaw at the time. He designed it on a Greek cross plan, in neogothic style, and it holds the remains of Stanisław Kostka Potocki, who died in 1821, and his brother Ignacy Potocki, a co-author of the Constitution of 3 May. Both Potocki brothers were among the most influential politicians of the Polish Enlightenment, so their grave in a small chapel on the edge of Wilanów is easy to miss, even though the people buried there are no less significant than those in the crypt of the collegiate church itself.
The cemetery survived the Second World War in relatively good condition, unlike many Warsaw necropolises destroyed at the time. It is still an active cemetery today. Alongside the Potockis lie ordinary Wilanów residents from the past two centuries, and among the old mausoleums and headstones there is a fair amount of nineteenth century funerary art. It makes a good spot for a quiet walk after visiting the palace and the collegiate church, though it is worth remembering that this is still a working parish cemetery, not an open air museum.
