Vienna may have been the earliest European city to end churchyard burials and establish extra-mural cemeteries, seven of which were opened in 1740. Vienna may be said to have served as a testing ground for other innovations in cemetery management; in the 1780s the Emperor Joseph II instituted a programme of reform, transferring control of burial from the church to the state, and opening a new hygienic cemetery, St Mark’s, designed to be free from superstition and the cult of the dead. In the 1870s the mayor of Vienna, Cajetan Felder, created what was then Europe’s largest municipal cemetery, and to increase its prestige and popularity, undertook a programme of exhumation of famous Viennese from other cemeteries and their reburial in the new Central Cemetery – possibly the first cemetery to be planned from the beginning for cemetery tourism.