The Copenhagen Plague of 1711

The scale of it

One person in three. That is the number to hold on to, because nothing else in Copenhagen's history moves that fast. The plague arrived in July 1711 and by August the city was digging mass graves, which is the point at which a burial system stops being a system. The churchyards inside the walls could not take what was being handed to them, and the consequences of that outlasted the epidemic by decades.

What it left behind

Assistens Cemetery is the direct result. It was laid out from 1757 and opened in 1760 outside the walls as a burial ground for the poor, specifically to take pressure off the churchyards inside the city after 1711. Today it is 25 hectares in Nørrebro and the largest green space in the inner district, with Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard and Niels Bohr in it. The full story is on the Assistens Cemetery page.

In the order of disasters

1711 is the first in a sequence that defines the century and a half that follows: the fire of 1728, the fire of 1795, the British bombardment of 1807 and the cholera epidemic of 1853. Copenhagen lost a third of its people, then nearly half its medieval core, then its cathedral, then almost five thousand more to a waterborne infection. The city that sells itself on hygge and good design was rebuilt four times over graves.

The guided ghost walk in English covers the city's dark history over an hour and a half from Nytorv — see the guided ghost walk for what it does and does not include, or the haunted places page for the buildings themselves.

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